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Title: The Little Review, January 1915 (Vol. 1, No. 10)
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Language: English
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1915 (VOL. 1, NO. 10) ***
THE LITTLE REVIEW
_Literature Drama Music Art_
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
JANUARY, 1915
The Allies Amy Lowell
The Logical Extreme George Soule
Little Flowers from a Milliner’s Box Sade Iverson
My Friend, the Incurable: Ibn Gabirol
On Personalities: Villon, Verhaeren,
Parnell, Rolland, Dostoevsky
A Note on Paroxysm in Poetry Edward J. O’Brien
The New Beauty Nicolas Beauduin
The Artist as Master Henry Blackman Sell
Evolution versus Stagnation Herman Schuchert
Dawn in the Hills Florence Kiper Frank
The Bestowing Virtue George Burman Foster
Editorials and Announcements
Mrs. Havelock Ellis’s “The Love of Tomorrow” Herman Schuchert
London Letter Edward Shanks
New York Letter George Soule
I Am Woman Marguerite Swawite
Albert Spalding Herman Schuchert
Book Discussion
Sentence Reviews
The Reader Critic
Published Monthly
15 cents a copy
MARGARET C. ANDERSON, PUBLISHER
FINE ARTS BUILDING
CHICAGO
$1.50 a year
Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago.
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Vol. I
JANUARY, 1915
No. 10
Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson.
The Allies
(_August 14th, 1914_)
AMY LOWELL
Into the brazen, burnished sky the cry hurls itself. The zigzagging cry
of hoarse throats, it floats against the hard winds, and binds the head
of the serpent to its tail, the long snail-slow serpent of marching men.
Men weighted down with rifles and knapsacks, and parching with war. The
cry jars and splits against the brazen, burnished sky.
This is the war of wars, and the cause? Has this writhing worm of men a
cause?
Crackling against the polished sky is an eagle with a sword. The eagle
is red and its head is flame.
* * * * *
In the shoulder of the worm is a teacher.
His tongue laps the war-sucked air in drought, but he yells defiance at
the red-eyed eagle, and in his ears are the bells of new philosophies,
and their tinkling drowns the sputter of the burning sword. He shrieks,
“God damn you! When you are broken the world will strike out new
shoots.”
His boots are tight, the sun is hot, and he may be shot, but he is in
the shoulder of the worm.
(_Over_)
A dust speck in the worm’s belly is a poet.
He laughs at the flaring eagle and makes a long nose with his fingers.
He will fight for smooth, white sheets of paper and uncurdled ink. The
sputtering sword cannot make him blink, and his thoughts are wet and
rippling. They cool his heart.
He will tear the eagle out of the sky and give the earth tranquility,
and loveliness printed on white paper.
* * * * *
The eye of the serpent is an owner of mills.
He looks at the glaring sword which has snapped his machinery and struck
away his men.
But it will all come again, when the sword is broken to a million dying
stars, and there are no more wars.
* * * * *
Bankers, butchers, shopkeepers, painters, farmers,—men, sway and sweat.
They will fight for the earth, for the increase of the slow, sure roots
of peace, for the release of hidden forces. They jibe at the eagle and
his scorching sword.
One! Two!—One! Two! clump the heavy boots. The cry hurtles against the
sky.
* * * * *
Each man pulls his belt a little tighter, and shifts his gun to make it
lighter. Each man thinks of a woman, and slaps out a curse at the eagle.
The sword jumps in the hot sky, and the worm crawls on to the battle,
stubbornly.
This is the war of wars, from eye to tail the serpent has one cause:
PEACE!
The Logical Extreme
GEORGE SOULE
(_The first of a series of three Dramatic Extravaganzas to be called
“Plays for Irascibles.”_)
CHARACTERS:
GENERAL HEINRICH VON BUHNE
MARYA RUDINOFF
SCENE:
A private dining room in the General’s house in Berlin. It is decorated
in black and white, and designed to impress one with the luxury of
austerity. A chaotic but strong cubist bust in black onyx is at the
left. The dining table, right center, is prepared for a meal. The effect
of the room is that of a subtle beauty compressed and given terrific
force by a military severity. There is a door at the rear and an
entrance for servants at the left.
The General enters rear, followed by Marya. He is tall, with a large
mustache and gray hair; his face and figure are in striking harmony with
the room. A man of high intellectual quality; the lines and angles of
his jaw, his mouth, his brows, are almost terrifying in their
massiveness. He is in evening dress, and wears a single crimson order.
Marya likewise is tall, a young woman with dark hair, and of a tense
beauty. She is subtle, yet apparently lacks utterly fear and the softer
qualities. She moves about with an unemphasized superiority over her
surroundings. She wears a red evening gown, low cut to show her superb
shoulders, yet without daring for its own sake. One feels that she would
be equally at ease as a nude Greek goddess.
The General seats her at the right of the table, bows, and sits opposite
her. Two servants enter with appetizers; they continue serving the
dinner as the dialogue progresses.
GENERAL VON BUHNE (_lifting his glass_). To a good day’s work. (_She
touches hers to her lips_) Fräulein Rudinoff, you are superb! I do not
refer to your beauty; any dog could see that. I don’t believe in praise.
But as a sculptor to his statue, allow me to say that of the many secret
agents I have employed, you are the most subtly efficient—cold as ice
and blazing as fire.
MARYA. Please, Heinrich! I don’t believe in praise either.
GENERAL. Not even when it is for myself? But you are right. Man does not
become strong until he ceases to wonder at his strength.
MARYA. That is your secret, I believe.
GENERAL. My secret, Marya? I do not have secrets. A secret is something
guarded, kept. My mystery, perhaps, yes. That is something which the
many are incapable of discovering—even when it is flaunted in their
faces.
MARYA. But we flaunt nothing, you and I.
GENERAL. No, we stand for everyone to see. My enemies think you are
their spy, and I—know what you are.
MARYA. And so, we have them at last where your iron fist can close on
them.
GENERAL. Yes, I have them, thanks to you. The poor visionary fools shall
not assassinate the chancellor and blow up the churches.
MARYA. You know, we women are supposed to worship the poets. Well, we
do, but we are fascinated and held by men like you. I loved the
comrades, but—as you see——
GENERAL. You are right, Marya. I love them, too; that is why—I crush
them. (He laughs shortly.) And perhaps that is why I dominate you. It is
not an effort; it is an instinct. There is something—inevitable—about
our love. That, I think, is because I—am inevitable.
MARYA. When I first came to you, Heinrich, I hated you. I think I do
still, a little. There is always the zest of hate about the greatest
love.
GENERAL. How you echo me! (_A silence_) Would it surprise you, my
beautiful one, to know that I, like you, was once an anarchist?
MARYA. You!
GENERAL. Yes, I, the bugaboo of the democrats, the great reactionary,
the militarist, the apostle of repression, the fortress of the German
Empire. I was once a revolutionist, and I plotted to kill your Czar!
MARYA. And yet you failed!
GENERAL. I am in a whimsical mood tonight. Shall I explain to you the
paradox?
MARYA. Tell me!
GENERAL. When I was a young chap I was restless, full of that driving
spirit all healthy youngsters have. The methodical occupations they gave
me in the Fatherland disgusted me. I had money, and I traveled. So I
came to Russia and took up with one of your artistic groups in an
interior city—I won’t tell you which. Believe me, I was fascinated,
lifted out of myself! The great, clean spirit of your intellectual
anarchists, the daily dangers they thrived on, the nonchalance with
which they met death or exile, their daring minds, which ripped the veil
from the future, their beautiful art productions—these things carried me
to the height of inspiration. They represented the highest human quality
of which it was possible to dream.
MARYA (_covering her eyes with her hand_). You have known that, too!
GENERAL. Yes, and love along with it. It was a boy-like worship. And
when my beloved one went to the scaffold it burned into me a white-hot
scar of fearlessness and severity I shall never lose. The love, I see
now, was ephemeral; the scar is eternal.
MARYA. And why did you leave them? Why did you leave them?
GENERAL. I had heard of America; I wished to go there and study the
freedom we desired to create in Russia.
MARYA. So you went; what then?
GENERAL. I found a country without a hereditary ruler, one rich in
opportunity, where all men are theoretically equal before the law. I
found a country where even the peasants read and have their magazines, a
country without a state church. It was a land won from the wilderness by
heroic struggle, whose freedom men had died to create, and whose unity
men had died to preserve.
MARYA. Did you not breathe more freely there?
GENERAL. Ah, Marya, that was the tragedy! I suffocated! For it was also
a country without a poet, without a musician, without a sculptor,
without a philosopher. The cities were run for loot, and the people, in
whose power everything lay, could not seize the reins. And
business—business—business, everywhere. As I went along the railroads I
saw nothing beside the track but dirty wooden shanties in the cities,
nothing in the country but ugly advertising signs. What do you think was
the best paid and most highly honored profession? Advertising!
MARYA. Are you lying to me!
GENERAL. No, it is the truth. Heroism, the love of beauty, the love of
truth—except convenient truth—any sort of high endeavor for its own
sake, was laughed at and crushed in those people by the dull weight of
prosperity. That whole nation was an ugly monument to the triumph of the
commonplace, a stone over the grave of godlike aspiration.
MARYA. But surely they have improved since then?
GENERAL. Do you know why they put up new buildings? Because some
millionaire who sells worthless things for five and ten cents wishes to
make money renting offices; because some railroad or insurance company
wishes to get advertising space in the papers without paying for it. Do
you know why the clergymen preach honesty? So that business conditions
may not be disturbed! Do you know for what purpose the magazines accept
stories and articles? So that they may gain the largest possible public
to offer up to their advertising men! Whenever an artist appears, he is
either ignored or scoffed at by that bestial monster, the majority! It
is like a prehistoric animal taking up the whole earth with his vast
bulk, seizing everything beautiful for food with which to stuff his maw,
and poisoning the air with the breath of his indigestion. (_He rises and
goes to the sideboard, where he busies himself selecting a cigar. As his
back is turned, Marya quickly empties a powder into his glass. As he
comes back and seats himself, she lifts her glass._)
MARYA. Then let us toast Russia, General! (_They drain their glasses._)
GENERAL. Would you mind telling me, Marya, how long I have to live? (_He
lights his cigar._) You are surprised? But that does not suit you. You
should have known me better than to think I did not know what you would
do when I turned my back tonight.
MARYA (_rising, pale_): About a minute, General.
GENERAL. Then let us use the time well. Now we can be perfectly frank.
Why have you—(_He waves his hand in the direction of the empty glass._)
MARYA. Because I am true to my cause! Because you are the scourge of
Germany; you represent everything we hate, every cruelty, every
oppression, every evil thing of the past. I have lived for this moment
for years!
GENERAL. Ah, you are beautiful! In you is my reward! And do you renounce
your love, too?
MARYA. I have loved you—more than I knew how to bear. Do not think I
shall live after you. And yet—I had to kill you!
GENERAL. Now I am ready to die. My work is done. I have produced the
beauty I desired!
MARYA. You? What do you mean?
GENERAL. You, who know how to kill what you love, can ask that? To
produce the rebellion in Germany, to make heroes with the scourge—that
has been my life! I, too, have lived for this moment! To be loved by a
woman with a flaming soul, a woman who is greater than her love!
MARYA (_Springing to him as he weakens_): Stay with me! Come back to me!
O Heinrich, Heinrich, I have wronged you!
GENERAL. No, Marya, you would have wronged me if you had not carried
your faith to its end. I—I—am the greatest anarchist of you all! (_He
dies. She looks at him a moment, puts her arms across her eyes, then
rises and speaks levelly to the servant who enters._)
MARYA. Peter, I have killed your master. No, do not be afraid, I shall
sit here quietly. Lock me in, if you like, and send for the authorities.
(_The servant stands stupidly staring at her._) Do as I say, at once!
(_He tumbles out. She sits slowly at her place, her elbows on the table,
looking dumbly into the distance._)
_Slow curtain_
Little Flowers From a Milliner’s Box
SADE IVERSON
Reminders
I have been making a little hat;
A hat for a little lady.
Red and brown leaves edge it,
And the crown is like brown moss.
If I might, I would say to her:
“Pay me nothing, pay me nothing—
I have been paid in full, lady—
I have been paid in memories.
Ah, the sweep of the sun-burned meadow
Rising above the woodland!
Ah, the drift of golden beech-leaves,
Fluttering the still hour through!
I can hear them falling, softly,
Softly, falling on the tawny ground.
The nuts, too, are falling, pad-pad,
Mischievously on the earth.
Never was sky so blue, so deep,
So unbearably perfect!
I throw up my hands to it,
I fling kisses heavenward,
To Something, to Somebody,
Who made beauty—who made Youth!
Take your hat, little lady,
Wear it smilingly;
It is all sewn with dreams,
And looped with memories.
Little dead joys, like mists,
Float about it invisibly,
Making it miraculous.
You lack the money to pay for these things.
It is I who owe you for the little hat
You commissioned, made of red and of brown leaves,
With a crown like sun-dried moss
In the woods where I once wandered.”
But I cannot afford to be kind,
Or strange, or mad, or merry.
She will give me purse-worn bills
For the little dream hat, the fairy-sewn hat,
And I shall say with formality:
“Thank you, madam; I am glad
You are pleased with the little hat.”
Stale, stale, flat, flat!
Will there never again come a day
When I shall be throwing kisses to the sky,
Hoping they will reach up to Him
Who made beauty, and little golden leaves,
And brown nuts falling in the Autumn woods?
Eidolons
I have been looking at the sun-ball,
Red as a Japanese lantern
Swinging low in the West
On a bed of saffron sky.
And now I have come into my room
With grey and lonely walls all about me,
And everywhere I look, behold,
Little wonderful bright balls are swinging!
My room is gay with them,
My wall is dancing.
Who could guess this little grey room could be so gay?
Voices
I awake in the night to the sound of voices—
Voices of strangers passing in the street.
I cannot hear what they are saying,
But it is easy to see that they are happy.
Perhaps they have been to a party,
Dancing to music—or remembering the birthday
Of some one whom they love.
I am glad to have heard them,
Glad they were laughing.
It fretted the silence
As the bright balls of a rocket
Fret the black sky of night.
As for me, I am shut up in silence,
Like a fly in odorous amber.
No one hails me, no one calls me;
No one tells me the day is fair
Or wishes me happy dreams.
Sometimes I fall to wondering,
What if I should run out onto the street,
Crying to some passerby:
“I would make a good friend to you!
I am one who understands friendship;
Try me and see!”
Oh, what would happen?
Should I be scorned?
Oh, silence, silence,
You are but a grey bubble, and I could break you
With one breath of impatience. Yet I dare not.
Something witholds me. Still must I waken
In the lonely night-time,
Taking joy from the voices of strangers
Passing in the street, talking, laughing.
Joy?
It mocks me like the sound of falling water
That tricks the ear of the thirst-mad wretch
Dying in the desert.
My desert is Silence!
It covers the bleak rotundity of the earth.
Ten Square Feet of Garden
Did you ever see my garden? See my mallow? See my larkspur?
My petunias like censers, snowy white and full of honey?
And my phlox, a summer snow-bank, and my haughty purple asters?
Did you ever see my flocks and herds, all my little golden
creatures?
Dusky honey-bees in plenty, golden bumble-bees a few?
Have you never seen them feeding on my larkspur and my mallow?
Some day I shall have a fountain, or a tiny pool for lilies.
And I’ll sit there, hidden safely, all alone and full of fancies,
Playing I’m a lovely princess, resting by her carven fountain.
I shall like to be a princess, to have friends and lovers by me!
I can praise them, I can chide them, tell them secrets if I like,
Flinging back their happy laughter like a handful of clear water.
Oh, my little treasured garden, ten square feet of haunting perfume,
Ten square feet of tossing blossoms, all my feoff and own dominion,
How I love you, with your old-gold, noisy, honey-bearing herds!
My Friend, the Incurable
III.
Personalities: Villon; Verhaeren; Parnell; Romain Rolland;
Dostoevsky
How do you do? Or, as Oscar Wilde preferred it, How do you think? It is
so much more interesting. Tell me, if you can, spontaneously, freely,
about your thoughts, reveal your personality, and we shall enjoy a most
engaging conversation, as charming as any good novel or essay. Speak
about yourself; people do this so much better than when they discuss
others. To me the most enchanting reading has always been literature of
Personality, such as subjective lyrics or chatty essays of the Montaigne
category; but I am particularly interested in Letters and Memoirs, where
the writer reaches transparency, unless he deliberately uses his pen as
a masque for self-concealment, as is the case, to my mind, in _De
Profundis_. True, an artist reveals his best in his artistic creation;
you discover autobiographical contours of Goethe in Faust and Werther;
Tolstoy’s restless searchings are mirrored in Besukhov, in Levin, in
Nekhludov; Zarathustra and _Ecce Homo_ allow you a glimpse into the very
crater of Vesuvius-Nietzsche. Yet through this medium you see the artist
in his royal garb, so to speak, in his regalia; he seldom appears to you
in his unceremonious morning-gown and slippers, to let you contemplate
him not at his _best_ but in his quotidian intimate aspect. Exceptions?
I admit a legion.
To be sure, Francois Villon[1] wore no stage array. His childish
frankness and spontaneity account for the fact that he is to this very
day an outcast among _bon ton_ salons, and even Robert Louis Stevenson
stooped to condemn him. Of course he is a disgrace for the fraternity of
writers: a thief, a robber, a murderer, a tramp, a debauchee, who
possessed less tact than even his by-no-means puritanic confrère,
Rabelais, and chanted most exquisite verses on most base topics. Villon
is not in the least detached from his poetry: he is it, his very life
was a song, a ballad. Filthy fifteenth century Paris, licentious monks,
mercenary courtesans, tavern sages, knights of the road and candidates
of the gibbet—in such an atmosphere the poet breathed, lived, and sang
in the old picturesque French. Every adventure, every experience,
impression, and emotion, Villon reflected in a ballad or a rondel, with
equal beauty and sincerity; with equal compassion and loyalty he chanted
to his religious mother and to the faded courtesan, to the duck-thief
and to the creaking gibbet; and he poured a world of tender humor and
sympathy into his greatest _Ballade des Pendus_, an epitaph for himself
and his companions expecting to be hanged. You may love him, you may
condemn him, but you cannot deny his absolute truthfulness, for his soul
is unreservedly denuded, a quivering, appealing, humane soul.
[1] _The Poems of Francois Villon_, translated by H. DeVere
Stacpoole. [John Lane Company, New York.]
Ayez pitie, Ayez pitie de moy.
A tout les moins, si vous plaist, mes amis!
Villon is justly called “the father of French poetry”; his influence has
been felt for nearly five centuries, from Rabelais to Verhaeren. Indeed,
in the savage cosmic rhythm of the “enormous” Belgian I often hear the
echo of the medieval “_Pauvre Villon_.” Verhaeren.... I must close my
eyes when I think of this Titan. You cannot gauge him, you cannot see
him in his entirety: an Atlas, bigger than our planet, detached from it.
I think Verhaeren has been best loved, and perhaps best understood in
Russia,—a land where realities are looked upon as symbols, else life
would become a horrible absurdity. There he is endeared as the lyricist
of the modern soul rent with eternal contradictions in the great task of
transvaluation of values: a mystic with no God, a prophet with no
blessing, a positivist without faith in man, a socialist without a
political program, an anarchist without “action,” an urbanite longing
for his village, a villager craving for the city. Verhaeren destroys
rather than creates, wills rather than believes, yearns rather than
attains. His movement lacks gracefulness; his attack, firmness; his
flight, lightness; his love, tenderness; his architecture is without
system, his system without method. And the more profound, the more
palpitating and irresistible is the chaos of his titanic images heaped
in masses, the more sincere are his wails, the more burning his tears. I
think it was the admirable French critic, René Ghil, who observed that
to Verhaeren the world appears as if in a flash of lightning, in an
enormous, exaggerated form, and as such he embodies it in his work—also
exaggerated, also enormous; that his poetry resembles the genius of
Rodin hewing his Balzac out of marble and powerful dreams.
How differently is Verhaeren conceived in the Teutonic mind! The
Austrian poet, Stefan Zweig,[2] has written an interesting book on the
Belgian, an elaborate study of his personality and works, which
substantiates my claim that people speak much more successfully about
themselves than about others. Herr Zweig appreciates Verhaeren highly
(and let me tell you sub rosa, my friend, that his general estimation of
the Poet is but a pale echoing of the brilliant Léon Bazalgette in his
book _Les célébrités d’aujourd hui_); he considers him the greatest poet
living, he names him _the_ European poet in the same sense as Whitman is
_the_ American poet. Soon, however, he falls into the Teutonic fallacy
of preciseness-by-all-means, of violently accurate definitions which
_must_ suit the facts, else—_desto schlimmer für die Fakten_. He wishes
us to believe with him that Verhaeren is the poet of socialism, of
democracy, that he has proclaimed his great Aye to contemporary life,
with its greed, factories, and smoke; that a poet who wants “to be
necessary to our time must feel that everything in this time is
necessary, and therefore beautiful.” Thus with the German skill in
fencing with Hegelian dialectics the critic endeavors to persuade us
that Verhaeren must needs love modern life in all its aspects, that he
is enraptured with all manifestations of contemporary spirit, from the
urban “multitude” to that most hideous platitude, the Eiffel Tower. Mr.
Zweig has utterly failed to see that Verhaeren does not feel the
present, the contemporary, that he lives spiritually in the past and in
the future, while the fleeting present is for him but a _symbol_, an
alphabet of monstrous hieroglyphs, the mysteries of which he interprets
prophetically. Has he not expressed his endless despair and maddening
grief over the tragedy of the all-absorbing monster-city? Has the world
not been to him a Golgotha, “an eternal illusion”? To Mr. Zweig
Verhaeren is a happy, satisfied lover of all and everything. The poet
and the painter, Maximilian Voloshin (one of whose poems appeared in THE
LITTLE REVIEW), relates his impression of the Belgian: “When you see him
for the first time you notice before anything else a deep furrow
cleaving his brow, resembling two wide-spread wings of a flying bird.
This furrow is himself. In it is his sorrow, his flight.” I wonder
whether Mr. Zweig has observed the furrow; or did he deliberately
overlook it in order to save his “structure”?
[2] _Emile Verhaeren_, by Stefan Zweig. [Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston.]
Yes, my friend, people seldom succeed in their attempt to interpret
others. Would you classify biographies as literature of personality?
Perhaps in the sense that they reveal the personality of the biographer,
but then it depends upon the value of that personality. Here is an
instance. The brother of Parnell writes his Memoirs[3], bringing forth a
mass of details and anecdotes of “Charley’s” life. Charles Parnell has
always been a fascinating personality to me. Long ago I heard a lecturer
speaking on the great Irishman before a European audience of
revolutionists; the listeners (by no means Irish!) were enchanted with
the figure of the unique leader, with his powerful individuality and
skillful strategy. I have pondered many a time over his portrait
revealing the mysterious face of a medieval sorcerer, and have looked
forward to a work that would help me in gaining a clearer idea of the
“uncrowned King of Ireland.” His brother’s memoirs gave me a wealth of
information about their family pedigree and about each individual member
(their number is considerable), particularly about the writer’s business
undertakings. About Charles Parnell I have learned numerous external
facts and figures, but his intrinsic self is as little known to me now
as before. Of what value is such a book which succeeds merely in
introducing to you Mr. John Howard, an Irish gentleman of no particular
interest?
[3] _Charles Steward Parnell: A Memoir_, by his brother, John
Howard Parnell. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
It is totally different when you are confronted with such a wonderful
individuality as Romain Rolland[4]. Apparently it is a book of essays on
Berlioz, Wagner, Saint-Saëns, D’Indy, Strauss, Debussy, and on some
aspects of modern music; in reality you come to know the rich
personality of Rolland and the reactions of his sensitive, graceful soul
on the musical productions of our best-known composers. I am delighted
with his influence on my views; not that he has altered them: musical
opinions do not let themselves be proved or disproved; but he has
_enhanced_ my attitudes, he has made me admire my favorites more
profoundly and hate my torturers more thoroughly. Do not let your Editor
know that Brahms’s symphonies prove as indigestible to Rolland as they
have been to your humble Incurable. It is the reading of such a book
that offers me the joy of looking into a great soul, and it reminds me
of the exalted experience I have had in reading Wilde’s _Intentions_, or
the essays of Przybyszewsky and Arthur Symons.
The unceremonious self-revealment of a great man, of which I spoke in
the beginning, does not always appeal to my aesthetic sense. At times my
feeling of delicacy is scalded at the sight of a repulsive negligee. It
has painfully irritated me to read Dostoevsky’s letters[5] in the
English translation: would that the Russians kept their dirty linen at
home. The book reveals a petty tragedy of a great personality; eternal
want, indebtedness, whimpering, small jealousy, narrowness, intolerance.
We learn how most of his books were written in a hurry, under pressure
of need, the author being aware of their inadequacy; we learn of his
petty envy towards Turgeniev, his slighting of Tolstoy, his bigoted
hatred of everything liberal, European, his sturdy opposition to the
revolutionists, his obsequious demeanor before high officials. With the
exception of a few bright spots, the pages produce the nauseating effect
of a pathological museum. Such a pity.
Come, now, friend: _How do you think?_
IBN GABIROL.
[4] _Musicians of To-Day_, by Romain Rolland. [Henry Holt
Company, New York.]
[5] _Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky._ [The Macmillan
Company, New York.]
A Note on Paroxysm in Poetry
EDWARD J. O’BRIEN
Paroxysm is the poetic expression of that modern spirit which finds its
most notable expression in other arts in the sculpture of Meunier, the
polyphonic music of Strauss, the philosophy of Bergson, and the American
skyscraper. It is the application of dynamics to poetry. It stands
midway between romanticism, which is an escape into the past, and
futurism, which is a flight into the future. Paroxysm is deep-rooted in
to-day.
M. Nicolas Beauduin, its most noteworthy French exemplar, has many
noteworthy disciples in France and Germany, and paroxysm is a well-known
force in every literature except that of America, where its unconscious
expression in life has been most remarkable. Students will find its
philosophy set forth and its current phases in literature duly
chronicled in M. Beauduin’s quarterly review, _La Vie des Lettres_. It
is only possible here to offer a few very brief hints as to its literary
aims and materials:
It aims to be a synthesis of modern industrial and mechanical
effort.
It repudiates the ivory tower.
It handles the materials of modern life directly, not in symbols.
It responds to the roar of factories and trains.
The poet is to be “an active lyric,” representing his age.
The poet’s vision is the cinematograph of modern life with its
continual mechanical transfiguration.
It is not sentimental.
To art for art’s sake, and art for truth’s sake, it opposes art
for life’s sake.
It discards personal sensation; it is not ashamed to be “cosmic.”
The evolution of poetry is to be as rapid and terrible henceforth
as material evolution.
It will sing the new man, the man-machine, the multiplied man,
the Man-Bird.
It exalts motion and repudiates equilibrium.
It is social.
It feels the need for violent motives of faith, and finds them in
the passion of the cities.
It cultivates a scientific technique.
It does not reject any words in forming a vocabulary.
It seeks swift, hurtling, dynamic rhythms.
It is based on “dynamic notions of qualitative duration, of
heterogeneous continuity, of multiple and mobile states of
consciousness.”
It perceives the elements of poetry contained in modern cities,
locomotives, aëroplanes, dreadnoughts, and submarines; in a stock
exchange, a Wall Street, or a wheat pit; and in every scientific
marvel and in the sonorous song of factories and railways.
It emphasizes their dynamic consciousness.
To sum up: It aims to attain and express with the quick, keen vigor and
strength of steel, the whirling, audacious, burning life of our epoch in
all the paroxysm of the New Beauty.
When M. Beauduin’s new volume, _La Cité des Hommes_, is translated and
published in America, it will be less difficult to estimate the success
with which paroxyst poetry may be achieved.
The New Beauty
NICOLAS BEAUDUIN
(_Authorized translation from the French by Edward J. O’Brien_)
Long years the poet had not understood
This powerful art bursting from forces in sight,
From the tamed element which revolts in cries,
From the victory of the spirit
Over the passive immensity of matter.
The modern beauty of joy and madness,
Of triumph and truth,
He saw her, in a passionate rhythm,
Flinging down the palaces of doubt and silence,
Vanquishing black scepticisms and torpors,
Rekindling the universe under her jets of vapor,
Destroying the vain mystery that disappears,
Covering the entire world with her network of iron,
Launching her towers, her bridges, her tunnels, her dockyards,
Over all the exasperated continents of the globe.
Ah! the new beauty, ardent, insatiate,
Strained toward conquest and the vastest life,
She was indeed the god whom nothing resists,
Dynamic beauty of swiftness and hope,
Rushing ever beyond, out of the blackness,
Dancing and paroxyst humanity.
He saw her at last, superb before him,
Entrapping error, mowing night;
She erected on the old barbaric soil
Her cathedral with its vertiginous walls,
Lit by the mad and whirling suns of the searchlights.
Beauty of brass, beauty of fire,
She was there visible as a god.
Beauty of vapor, geometric beauty,
Modern beauty who builds for her temple and landscape
High furnaces casqued with purple and gold,
Cities mad beneath their electric lamps,
Launching at conquered heaven in spirals of pride,
The rut of dynamos and the bustle of windlasses,
The multiplied brutal effort of the machines,
The fiery flight of aeroplanes in the air,
The frantic trolleys under their sheaves of lightnings,
And dominating the night of silence and hatred,
The terrible thunderous flight of hertzian waves.
The Artist as Master
_The Japanese Print: An Interpretation, by_ Frank Lloyd Wright.
[Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company, Chicago.]
HENRY BLACKMAN SELL
“‘A flower is beautiful,’ we say—but why? Because in its geometry and
its sensuous qualities it is an embodiment and significant expression of
that precious something in ourselves which we instinctively know to be
Life, ‘an eye looking out upon us from the great inner sea of beauty,’ a
proof of the eternal harmony in the nature of a universe which is too
vast and intimate and real for the mere intellect to grasp.”
Yet our materialists would solve the Problem with their material
intellects. And our theologians would solve it with their ecclesiastical
deductions. The one would put Life in the cold hands of the scientist,
expert in fact and figure; the other, gropingly indefinite, in the hands
of the spiritual formulaist. Yet both are wrong. The Problem can be
solved. The literal, objective guesses of the materialist are but flimsy
realisms far from true. The indefinite, abstract dreams of the
theologian are but the futile inaptitudes of man calculated to define
that which cannot be defined.
But definitions are not what the world needs. The Solution would be
interesting, but the Problem is fascinating. It is the Going and not the
Goal that holds us to the bitter and the sweet, through mornings, noons,
and nights, year by year.
If, then, we grant the Solution but a cold conclusion, and the Goal but
a stagnation point, to whom can we turn but to the artists—those
spiritual children of that great master who wept when he could find no
imperfection in his masterpiece.
The artist, whose interests are in the _interpretations_, and not in the
_translations_ of Life, and whose interpretations have given Life all
that it holds sacred.
There is no power but has its root in his ....
There is no power
But his can withold the crown or give it
Or make it reverent in the eyes of men.
Written philosophies of artist craftsmen are rare. Their busy lives find
little time for penning rules; but when one does speak, it is with the
captivating force of original thought: the summary of attainments
through many trials and many failures.
And it is with this sure touch of deep artistic experience that Frank
Lloyd Wright draws from the geometric beauty of the mystic Japanese
prints his philosophy of the artist as master of the Problem.
“Real civilization means for us a right conventionalizing of our
original state of nature, just such a conventionalizing as the true
artist imposes on natural forms. The law-giver and reformer of social
customs must have, however, the artist soul, the artist eye in directing
this process, if the light of the race is not to go out. So, art is not
alone the expression, but in turn the great conservator and transmitter
of the finer sensibilities of a people. More still, it is to show those
who shall understand just where and how we shall bring coercion to bear
upon the material of human conduct. So the indigenous art of a people is
their only prophecy and their school of anointed prophets and kings. Our
own art is the only light by which this conventionalizing process we
call “civilization” may eventually make its institutions harmonious with
the fairest conditions of our individual and social life.
“I wish I might use another word than ‘conventionalizing’ to convey the
notion of this magic process of the artist mind, which is the constant
haunting reference of this paper, because it is the perpetual, insistent
suggestion of this particular art we have discussed. Only an artist, or
one with genuine artistic training, is likely, I fear, to realize
precisely what the word as here used connotes. Let me illustrate once
more. To know a thing (what we can really call knowing), a man must
first love the thing and sympathize vividly with it. Egypt thus knew the
lotus, and translated the flower to the dignified stone forms of her
architecture. Thus was the lotus conventionalized. Greece knew and
idealized the acanthus in stone translations. Thus was the acanthus
conventionalized. If Egypt or Greece had plucked the flowers as they
grew, and given us a mere imitation of them in stone, the stone forms
would have died with the original. In translating, however, its very
life’s principle into terms of stone well adapted to grace a column
capital, the Egyptian artist made it pass through a rarifying spiritual
process, whereby its natural character was really intensified and
revealed in terms of stone adapted to an architectural use. The lotus
gained thus imperishable significance; for the life-principle in the
flower is translated—transmuted to terms of building stone to idealize a
real need. This is conventionalization. It is reality because it is
poetry. As the Egyptian took the lotus, the Greek the acanthus, and the
Japanese every natural thing on earth, as we may take and adapt to our
highest use in our own way a natural flower or thing, so civilization
must take the natural man, to fit him for his place in this great piece
of architecture we call the social state. And today, as centuries ago,
it is the prophetic artist mind that must reveal this natural state
idealized, conventionalized harmoniously with the life-principle of all
men. How otherwise shall it be discerned? All the sheer wisdom of
science, the cunning of politics and the prayers of religion can but
stand and wait for the revelation,—awaiting at the hands of the artist
that conventionalization of the free expression of life-principle which
shall make our social living beautiful,—organically true. Behind all
institutions or dogmatic schemes, whatever their worth may be, or their
venerable antiquity,—behind them all is something produced and preserved
for its aesthetic worth; the song of the poet, some artist vision, the
pattern seen in the mount.
“Now speaking a language all the clearer because not native to us,
beggared as we are by material riches, the humble Japanese artist has
become greatly significant because he is the interpreter of the one
permanent thing in the life of his people; that one permanent thing
being the principle of a right conventionalization of life which makes
of their native forms the most humanly significant, and most humanly
joy-giving as in its ever varied moods and in evanescent loveliness he
has made Fujiyama—that image of man in the vast—the God of Nippon.”
Evolution versus Stagnation
(_Being a Debate, with Rare Illustrations, by Major Funkhouser, Mr.
Lucian Cary, and The Camera, reported for_ THE LITTLE REVIEW _by
Herman Schuchert_.)
Place: Fullerton Hall.
Time: Thursday afternoon, December 10, 1914.
Characters: Mere and supporting members of the Drama League, and others
mentioned above; also guards, committees, and a few men.
* * * * *
MAJOR FUNKHOUSER (_his remarks, condensed_).
Censorship of the movies is necessary because it must be.
Buildings, public rights, and milk are censored, and it is good.
Fifty per cent of a movie audience is under fifteen years of age.
I may be wrong sometimes, but I pass what I think they should see.
We must be big-brothers to our citizens of lesser intelligence.
I told my four daughters only what I thought they should know.
I believe in telling women as little as they may really need.
The working class wants salacious stuff; we must prevent.
These excerpts from banned films will illustrate my points:
* * * * *
THE CINEMATOGRAPH (_its pictures, briefly mentioned_).
Woman and man clutching each other in a raging, although amiable,
passion.
Boy being taught how to pick pockets.
Hold-up.
Woman and man in furious love-experiments.
Mexicans burning bodies of dead rebels.
Doctors dressing Mexican battle-wounds.
Woman and man preparing the furnace of love.
Woman and man ....
Woman ....
Man ....
* * * * *
MR. LUCIAN CARY (_his ideas, pieced together_).
These pictures are positively abominable.
No human being could possibly want to see them.
If we must have censorship, the Major’s is as good as any.
Censorship with flaws is preferable to perfect censorship because
perfect censorship would abolish the necessity of one’s judgment.
Imperfect censorship permits us, by its slips, to exercise our minds.
In no other civilized country is there such restriction.
Artists in America must keep their keenest visions to themselves.
Censorship deadens human perceptions.
Who wants cloistered virtues when true health is possible?
Man must learn to judge for himself; and he surely will do so.
America is unprecedented in its timidity of tastes and convictions.
* * * * *
MRS. HENDERSON _(in a bored manner)_.
It isn’t a question of arbitrary standard; it’s purely aesthetic.
The Major passes films of the most flagrant sentimentality.
Only legal restrictions are made, and these are futile.
The only satisfactory standard is that of individual taste.
Of course, the title of this debate was not quite the one used on this
article. It was very tame—the title. But not so with the films. The
Major had evidently selected his choicest ones—and a goodly number of
these—which were reeled off in swift succession. Murder trod on the
heels of love. Flaming moments of lust were split up by stage-robbers.
Nigger babies, whose crime was that they didn’t need clothes, followed
suicides.
Your reporter was fortunate enough to find an acquaintance, sitting in
the rear of the hall. This lady married a man of millions. He liked the
way she did _Florodora_—liked it so well that he gave her a chance,
which she has since made much of. She is charming, because she has
retained the frankness of the stage and merely exchanged the shoddy furs
and diamonds for the real thing. She confided that _The Follies_ were
simply right, and that the Drama League was radically opposed to the
movies in any or all forms, and that she adored winter because it kept
reminding her of Christmas. She is a supporting member of the League,
and the only one present who waived her constitutional prerogative of a
front seat. Her sisters-in-league were availing themselves of their
privilege. They wanted to be where they could not get out, in case the
pictures were really good.
And they were—sickening. Not a member left. Not a whisper. All eyes
focused upon the screen, where horrors of war and of love (in which
there seemed to be nothing fair) were showing. When their nervous
systems could stand no more, some lady’s locomotive and oral powers
returned, and the reel was stopped.
Then came Mr. Cary, who found it difficult not to speak over their heads
with his simple language and big ideas. The audience whispered and began
to show the tips of countless yellow-feathers. They could stand horrible
pictures; but this talk was too much. It was too sane and calm and
cutting. Yellow feathers showed, full length. Women left in twos and
threes, although the first person to go out was a male. Cary’s short,
admirable paragraphs were divided in this manner:—three ladies on the
right of the hall would balance their departure under cover, as it were,
of the departure of three sisters on the left. This mental cowardice was
worse than the pictures.
An intolerable discussion followed. A huge wave of ancient yet
ever-modern philistinism raised itself among the majority of those who
remained, and surged across the hall to drown Mr. Cary and Mrs.
Henderson. Major Funkhouser found his feet again, and assumed the
big-brother-protector attitude, to repeated grand-stand advantages. As
long as they had seen the pictures, what matter if the public didn’t?
Evolution lost the day. Stagnation was an immediate success. Your
reporter left, grinning.
Free, dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thought would I hear of,
and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke.—_Nietzsche._
Dawn in the Hills
FLORENCE KIPER FRANK
Out of the vast,
Flooding and flowering the cool, skyey vast,
Day, day at last!
Squandering, spilling, pouring white-flecked fire,
Higher and higher
The light of the sun mounts into the dim of the sky.
And all the little fields that lie
At the foot of the hills that hold them in mothering tender,
Sweet with translucent, shimmering green,
Lay themselves bare to the sun, and the hill-trees slender,
Upward reaching thin arms of prayer,
A-shiver with ecstasy, tipped with sheen,
Sway to the quivering call of the fresh-stirring air.
Through the night have I waited Thy summons, through the night have
I lain
Racked with unutterable, ancient, blackening pain.
And the soul of me touched not Thy presence nor felt Thee about me,
And the soul of me, sick with its hate and dismay, was minded to rout
Thee,
Yea, from itself to tear Thee, enduring without Thee.
But now have I found Thee again, O my Comrade, again!
In the light of the morning and white of the dawn I behold Thee.
See, with my arms outstretched, I enclose and enfold Thee.
With a shout that the darkness is light, I enclose and enfold Thee.
Now feed me with life as with rain is nourished the flower!
Crown me with ecstasy, drench me with power!
See, I am bare to Thee as the fields are bare to the sun.
Resplendent, vivid, ever-living One,
This is the moment, this the creative hour!
Lo, I am one with thee,
I partake, I am washed anew.
Out of lies this is true,
Out of the dark of lies and entangling hates this is true,
That Thou who art ever-living, out of death shall create anew.
What weakling spirit knew thee gray and old,
Thou flaming one,
Thou fructifying sun,
Thou trumpet-call of morning to the blood,
Thou surge of the earth flood!
Youth of the universe art Thou, militant, bold.
Naught to Thee is decay,
When the spirit rots in its shroud,
And the horrible thoughts of night have way,
And life is a noisome cloud;
A noisome cloud of the fen,
Dank with the spirit’s decay!
O out of the morning laughest Thou then,
Out of the singing day.
Out of the morning leapest Thou,
Laughing at fear and pain,
And the horrible thoughts of night give way,
And the soul is created again.
The hills now are flooded with light and the trees rejoice
With happy voice.
The smell of the sweet, green things is in the air.
The breeze is a prayer.
And my soul, O my Comrade, my living soul is a prayer.
And rapture gives way to peace.
The dawning faints into the day.
Out of night have I found release,
Out of death, the way.
And my heart is calm with Thee, my heart that went forth with a shout.
Thou hast compassed me wholly about.
With the floods of Thy peace Thou hast compassed me wholly about.
I am elate with power.
Past is the creative hour.
I am calm for the ways of men.
Shall I not proclaim Thee then
To the doubting lives of men!
Out of the dawn have I plucked Thee.
I go to the world of men.
The Bestowing Virtue
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
The thou is older than the I; the thou hath been proclaimed holy, but
the I not yet; thus spake Zarathustra.
In times most ancient—at culture’s dawn of day—the individual was
swallowed up and lost in the life of the tribe. He did not count as an
individual, but was valued only as a member of the group to which he
happened to belong. Subsequently, man’s endowment to personality entered
upon its unfolding—the first syllables of the long human story were
stammered. Man began to become a self. To be a self was to specialize
into a difference from all other men. From that moment on, the entire
course of evolution may be considered as a progressive differentiation
and specialization of the human personality. At the outset there were
only a few splendidly and highly endowed natures that felt a distinct
life of their own welling up in themselves from mysterious springs of
being. They took up the gauge of battle against others, against the mass
which attempted to subject and assimilate them to its peculiarity. Mass
meant monotony. But the differentiating energy and impetus encroached
further and further, passing from the great to the small, pushing into
the mass whose members no longer wanted to be mass, herd, but men. The
might of spiritual personality opposed itself to the superiority of
corporeal peculiarity. Psychical feeling more and more became personal.
Character increasingly received a distinctive stamp. Along with this,
the impulse to self-dependence began to stir even in those men who were
outclassed in physical strength by their stronger human brothers. Later,
when the head and heart, and no longer the fist, formed the strength of
man, woman pressed into the circle of life’s evolution. She was no
longer a mere exemplar of the genius. She, too, would be personality.
This course of events signified an infinite refinement and enrichment of
cultural life on the one side; on the other, it gave rise to the
question as to how, in this differentiation of men into even more
decidedly pronounced personalities, a cohesiveness could be originated
among them that would save life from disintegration and consequent
decay. At bottom, the individual is not sufficient unto himself.
Self-dependent, he would be miserably impoverished and stunted—of this
there can be no doubt, according to the most elementary laws of life.
Hence, along with the formation of human personality, there is a
refinement of those forces of life which seem summoned to secure a bond
of fellowship among men: law, custom, a benevolent disposition toward
others, the feeling of sympathy for others. Even Nietzsche, who foresees
a future in which all these older group forces and moral impulses shall
be obliterated, and every man pander to his own self alone and his own
peculiarity in willing and feeling, in thinking and speaking—even
Nietzsche cannot help preaching a new love that shall bind men together.
Even Zarathustra confesses: “I love men! My will, my ardent will to
creation, impels me constantly to men—as the hammer to the stone!” To be
sure, this Zarathustra-love is to grow out beyond and above what we call
love to-day, what we call Christian love. There is to be a Beyond
Christianity. The new love will be as high above the old love as
Above-Man will be above man. Beyond-man means Beyond-love. How earnestly
and ominously does this preaching of a new love pierce like a sword into
the heart of our time! A new test of the worth or unworth of our moral
view of life! Were we even convinced that the best and purest features
of the old Christian love would re-appear in any new love, still the
question would not be elucidated—the question whether this old love
would thereby become new again, would become living again, save through
a storm of thunder and lightning that should purify the heavy, stuffy
atmosphere which has gathered about the word love itself.
You will know them by their fruits—of nothing is this so true as of
love. Where there is power, an effect must ensue, and in the effect, not
only the right of the power, but the kind as well, manifests itself.
Now, love wills to promote the life of another with its own life. Love
wills to do good to its object, to redress some wrong, supply some lack,
help some need, remedy some defect, and the like. Therefore, the fruits
of love are gifts—hence, _die schenkende Tugend_, the bestowing or the
giving virtue, of Nietzsche’s phrase. Accordingly, only a possessor can
give. Who possesses most—the rich—give most! Who needs gifts is poor,
and since poverty is great, becoming ever greater, gifts are needed to
meet the needs. Thus, human love has become the practice of
beneficence—the work of the rich by which they help the poor. The
greatness of benefactions, this becomes a criterion for the greatness of
love. We have but to think of the “foundations” and “benevolent funds”
and “charitable institutions” and “unions” for the care and keeping of
the poor, as well as of the incalculable sums which are given in private
for the relief of want, in order to be impressed with the “fruits” which
have grown on the tree of human love. How magnificent, how imposing
these “fruits” are! How much love there is in the world today, in this
world in which so much good is done! Who could doubt it? Who could deny
it? Who? Who but Friedrich Nietzsche!
The loathsome vanity and the refined hypocrisy with which this
beneficence is prosecuted, such obvious strictures as these, Nietzsche
passes over without a word. This genus “benefactor” that does what it
does just to benefit itself, is so lowdown to the Zarathustra-poet that
he will not honor it with a notice. He simply classed it with the gilded
and counterfeit rabble, _Pöbel_, with the culprits of wealth, who pick
their profits from sweepings. Then there is the criterion of the
numerical worth of the gift, not the ratio of the gift to the
possessions of the giver, this criterion for the evaluation of love was
so external, so deceptive, to Nietzsche, that he left it, too, out of
account. What impelled Nietzsche to his depreciation of this whole
species of beneficence was something different, something deeper. All
these gifts, great and numerical as they may be, are alms, and who has
only alms to give to man is a poor man, and Zarathustra feels—well,
listen to what he says to the saint!
Zarathustra answered: “I love men.”
“Why,” said the saint, “did I go to the forest and desert? Was it not
because I loved men greatly over-much? Now I love God: men I love not.
Man is a thing far too imperfect for me. Love of men would kill me.”
Zarathustra answered: “What did I say of love! I am bringing gifts to
men.”
“Do not give them anything,” said the saint. “Rather take something from
them and bear their burdens along with them—that will serve them best;
if it only serve thyself well! And if thou art going to give them aught,
give them no more than an alms, and let them beg even for that.”
“No,” said Zarathustra, “I do not give alms. I am not poor enough for
that.”
_I am not poor enough for that._ Priceless words! You read these words
and you think of truly kindhearted men who sigh: If I were only rich so
I could do good! They envy the rich their possessions, not for the sake
of the pleasures and comforts which possessions permit their possessors
to provide, but in the wholly honest feeling of the blessings which they
could scatter with their wealth. Then comes Nietzsche, and says to these
kindhearted men, You are only poor noodles, if you have nothing better
to bring the world and men than this blessing of wealth. Then he points
them to gifts the least of which outweighs a million donations.
Now, Nietzsche had no contempt of wealth with which to insult his
fellowmen’s intelligence. Nor was he a socialistic indicter of
beneficence. Nor was he even a rigorous critic of the doubtful
disposition, so often manifest in such benevolent activities. But
perhaps his plain words on the poverty of almsgiving seem so weighty
precisely because he must be acquitted without further ado of speaking
from contempt, from the standpoint of Christianity, or from the milieu
of poor folk. And yet it was this most soaring spirit of the nineteenth
century, this aristocrat from top to toe, compared with whom even a
Goethe seems like a plebeian, it was precisely he who—as from an aerie
up among the eagles—looked down with such abysmal contempt upon the
highest and noblest triumph of riches—namely, the ability to bestow
benefits—that he detected, even in this triumph, only testimony to the
poverty of riches. Along with this, at all events, Nietzsche passed
damnatory judgment upon a _Kultur_ which estimates the distances among
men, the measure of their greatness according to the distinctions of
possession, and therefore derives the right of the influence which it
accords the individual from the sums which he donates by way of alms.
Then, too, what has the man to do with his possession! It is not his
_personality_ which has assigned him a place in life where a confluence
of industrial goods crystallize around him! What does it signify as to
the worth of a man that he has cast his baited hook into the stream of
life just where a big hungry fish swims by and bites! And if, now, this
most contingent of all contingencies, that a man should get rich, is
considered by his generation as the peculiar deed of a hero, the deed
which he was in a position to compass in life,—if the mere fact that a
man releases, in the shape of benefits and alms, a part of this wealth
which he could not spend upon himself if he would is a phenomenon around
which the conversation of the day revolves, of which newspapers in
special articles and telegraphic dispatches have so much to say, then
this is a sign of the decay of our moral culture, and we cannot be
thankful enough to the man who has jolted us out of such aberration of
ideas and made us see with eyes no longer blinded by the glitter of
gold!
Aye, wealth a man does need who wants to give. Wealth he needs for the
sake of his giving love. But he must create this wealth himself. He must
wrest wealth from all values. He must coerce all things to himself and
into himself. All these things must stream back from the well of living
water within him as the gifts of his love. Insatiably does the soul seek
after treasures and gems because her virtue is insatiable in her will to
give. This is the soul’s thirst to be an offering and a gift, and hence
she thirsts to house all wealth in herself.
Vulgar souls give what they have, noble souls what they are—this is the
well known saying that mirrors the meaning of Nietzsche. Love’s highest
labor is to create something great out of its ownself, that it may be
able to give unceasingly out of its own fulness and yet never be
exhausted! No mountain is too steep and no valley too deep for love,
because love herself must know heights and depths that she may give to
others what she has seen and known there. Do we fear lest we succumb to
a weakness? Then we must force the weakness underneath our feet because
we need our strength to give strength to others. Would we say to virtue:
Thou art too hard for us; take thy laurel and let us sin? Now, the
hardest is spur to our love, to steel our wills, our courage, so that
courage may gush into the souls of others also. What we have made out of
our own selves, this, this alone, is our wealth, this is the gift by
whose bestowal men can become rich. A thought of our own which we have
acquired; a light of our own, which we have kindled in our innermost
being; a lofty enthusiasm for what is great; an energetic aversion to
all that is common and base,—this is our true wealth, the gift that
enriches us while it is given to others. Poor indeed are the people who
can give only alms; rich indeed are those who give themselves to men,
who proffer their most intimate gifts to men, who say to men’s hidden
hearts and hopes: Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have, I
give unto thee!
Why are we so deeply involved in hard necessity that our life can not
dispense with alms and therefore with the people who make a virtue out
of this giving of alms! Simply because we have so few such truly rich
men who thirst to become offerings and gifts for man! These men can we
have, can we become ourselves, only when duty and righteousness, and not
benevolence and inclination, shall decide in an ordering and helpful
way, as to the requirement of life. Behind every benefit which is
necessary there is concealed an unrighteousness of life which makes the
benefit necessary. All alms with which the world cannot dispense today
is an accusation against our culture, a confession of how poor we are in
the midst of all our wealth. It will be the first great step towards a
new culture when we first learn to measure the unworth of these benefits
by the eternal worths which alone are worthy of man, which man forms in
himself as new fructifying deeds, as the lightning of thought which
detonates from his soul, as living beauty to which he gives shape in his
own being.
Then if all duties which are based on right and law, shall cease to be
considered as something special, something great, if their fulfilment
shall be no longer marveled at as a feat of virtue, because these duties
shall have become self-evident and natural, then shall man be illumined
by new and greater duties which shall make him a debtor to life, then
shall he call his wealth and the fulness of his being his debt which he
can pay only in constant creation for man, in ceaseless giving to man!
“Therefore, nobler souls will it: they will to have nothing _gratis_,
least of all life! Whoever is of the _Pöbel_ wills to live _gratis_, but
we others to whom life gave itself—we ever meditate as to what we can
best give in return and, verily, that is a noble saying which says: what
life promises us, that will we keep for life!” In simpler language: Not
to merit a reward, heavenly or earthly, will we give, will we assemble
in ourselves the highest gifts, to lay them down as offerings upon the
altars of men, but we will give to return thanks for all that we have
undeservedly received. Bickering and calculating as to whether we have
had our just dues, haggling over hopes which have not done what they
promised, we will have none of this, but thanks, thanks, that as men we
have gained some material from the saddest life, created joys out of its
pains, wealth and worth out of its weakness and loss. This, this, in
Nietzsche’s immortal words, is _eine Umwertung der Werte_, a
transvaluation of values in the moral life, from which a new moral
culture can issue. In our labors we are ever shadowed by the still,
lurking thought of returns and rewards, we calculate, and calculate ever
in our own favor, that somewhere life has left us in the lurch. Could we
but once reverse this matter: It is not life that is obligated and
indebted to us—we are obligated and indebted to life! In the former way
of counting we always come out with a deficit, with a poverty: in the
later, with a balance, with a wealth: we still have something for which
we gave nothing, did nothing, with which we have done no good!
How would it do to put such thankfulness to the test? When the heart is
shaken with sorrow’s power—it is life’s gift to feel such shaking, in
such shaking love can feel the storm raging. Even such gift you would
not have _gratis_. You would make some return—the bravery with which you
settle for it. You come to know despondency, a new deed, and your thanks
therefor is that you have been permitted to overcome a paralysis of your
energy. If, with freer vision and with broader heart, your eye has
become alert and keen for human folly and lamentation, and these attack
you as cowardice and disgust of life, then you take this as a gift that
you will not have _gratis_, you will give something as counter-gift and
thanks: a more energetic will, that will go to the bottom of folly and
grief, with the fineness of feeling which has been bestowed upon you—you
will dig deeper, search out more earnestly the genuine values of life,
so that your cowardice and your _ennui_ at life may become a new
strength and a new joy for life. If you feel your hands tied, if the
world seems a prison at whose bars you lunge, but whose rods you cannot
break, if then a horrible feebleness befalls you, and your best will
confesses that you are too weak,—then take this, too, as a gift for
which you learn to give thanks, for even the restriction of your power
creates a new freedom, the pressure of the impossible ceases with your
learning, thus, the possible, the necessary, of your life. Poor? You may
be rich, immeasurably rich, not for yourself indeed, but for others,
that you may communicate to them, give to them and yet never give out!
Be debtor of life, that in your poverty you may make many rich. Be
debtor of love, that you may never be able to pay your great eternal
debt. Confessing and obligating yourself to such debt, your life gains
that eternal worth which increases the more you spend of it, which
receives, the more you give of it. Poor, yet having all things; poor,
yet making many rich—_also sprach Paulus-Nietzsche_.
After this Zarathustra went back into the mountains and the solitude of
his cave and withdrew from men, waiting like a sower who hath thrown out
his seed. But his soul was filled with impatience and longing for those
he loved; for he had still many gifts for them. For this is the hardest:
to shut one’s open hand because of love.
It is the business of the very few to be independent: it is the
privilege of the strong, and whoever attempts it, even with the
best regret but without being obliged to do so, proves that he is
probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He
enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousand-fold the
dangers which life itself already brings with it; not the least
of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way,
becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of
conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far
from the comprehension of men that they can neither feel it nor
sympathize with it, and he cannot any longer go back! He cannot
ever go back again to the sympathies of men.—_Nietzsche._
Editorials and Announcements
_Mrs. Havelock Ellis_
Mrs. Ellis’s visit to Chicago has been a series of revelations. At first
she was a little disappointing: in her lecture on James Hinton and his
sex ethics—particularly in the discussion which followed it—Mrs. Ellis
did not loom as large as some of her more “destructive” contemporaries.
The thing was beautifully done, of course—a gorgeous bit of
interpretative art; for Mrs. Ellis chooses words with a poet’s care and
presents ideas with an economy that is invigorating and restful at the
same time. But in so far as the lecture reflected her own ideas it had
some of the limitations to which the eugenist point of view is always
open: the failure to go quite the whole distance. Compared with the
directness and honest thoroughness of the few pioneers who are
advocating birth control—like Margaret Sanger, whose little pamphlet on
the subject will cost her ten years imprisonment if the authorities can
get hold of her—the ideas of Mrs. Ellis came with a certain inadequacy.
But later she cleared herself of the charge of cultism by her laughing
remark to some one who discussed eugenics with her: “Eugenics? A mere
spoke in the wheel, and a very dogmatic spoke at that. Heaven knows we
don’t want a race of averages.” One of her most delightful afternoons
was given over to her Cornish stories. She read one called _The
Idealist_, which ought to be studied by all those who draw their rigid
distinctions between “normal” and “abnormal”. As Mrs. Ellis said, “This
story is an attempt to show that those people we so piously consider the
worst of us are sometimes the best of us.” And so this charming woman
with her simplicity, her humor, her frankness, her idealism, and her
fine boyishness is a personality one must not fail to know. She returns
to Chicago on February 4, to lecture on sex and eugenics in Orchestra
Hall. That lecture will be given exclusively to women and will include a
discussion of sex abnormalities, as well as a paper on the subject
written especially for the occasion by her husband, which Mrs. Ellis
will read.
_A Journal of Ideas_
The New Republic is the first weekly in America which has dared to
assert that ideas are interesting, even if they are new. We have had one
kind of weekly whose main purpose is to pay dividends to its owners.
Dividends demand advertising, advertising demands large circulation,
circulation demands pleasing as many people as possible, pleasing many
people has seemed to demand piffle and dishonesty. We have had another
kind of weekly which confines itself to academic criticism and frankly
gives up any attempt to speak to the nation. _The New Republic_ is run
neither for dividends nor for ancient prestige. It proceeds on the
assumption that we can find writers who are both honest enough and
intelligent enough to speak things of a value not determined either by
capital or by the mob. It hopes that their product may be so interesting
that the people who want to read it will be sufficiently numerous to
support the paper. It hopes vastly more that the ideas and opinions so
enunciated will introduce a powerful and much-needed element of
disinterested intelligence into American public life. The way in which
these hopes are put into print will have much to do with the success of
the attempt. But it is hopeful that somebody with adequate resources and
equipment is actually engaged in the attempt to relate honesty and
intelligence with the democracy.
_John Cowper Powys_
When the Welshman, John Cowper Powys, comes to the Chicago Little
Theatre for his lectures during January and February a great many people
ought to fall under the spell of this man whose methods spoil one for
almost all other lectures. Mr. Powys’s intellect has that emotional
character which is likely to be the quality of the man of genius rather
than the man of talent. He might be called the arch-appreciator: he
relies upon the inspiration of the moment, and when violently
enthusiastic or violently the reverse (he is usually one of the two) he
never stops with less than ten superbly-chosen adjectives to express his
emotion exactly. His subjects will be Dostoevsky, Wilde, Milton, Lamb,
Hardy, Henry James, Dante, Rabelais, Hugo, Verlaine, Goethe, and Heine.
The dates may be had at the Little Theatre.
Mrs. Havelock Ellis’s “The Love of Tomorrow”
HERMAN SCHUCHERT
One’s sense of the general or the particular fitness of things is
disturbed when an attempt is made to paraphrase or condense the spoken
words of Mrs. Ellis. It is seldom that this sense of fitness is at all
troubled, because it is a simple matter to extract from the average
lecture enough coherent material for second-hand purposes. On the
subject given above Mrs. Ellis compels continuous attention. It is not
enough to say that she steadily advances her ideas by means of careful
phrases, for every phrase seems to be an idea in itself. She is an
artist. Her words are like so many focussed lights, not one of which is
superfluous. And the illumination which she obtains is a grateful
brightness. In listening to her one’s powers of receptivity, while never
strained, are not for one moment allowed to rest. As she says, “It’s all
solid meat.” Hence, the feeling of futility in an attempt to present
justly her observations and schemes of social betterment.
What an absurdity might be suggested to the reader by the statement that
Mrs. Ellis advocates a form of “trial marriage” or a “probation for
engaged lovers”! And yet her plan of such a pre-ceremonial arrangement
is as practical as it is badly needed—practical and entirely reasonable,
in that she has apparently overlooked nothing, from the subtleties of
human nature to the future laws of the land. And how faddish might she
appear if one told of her attacks upon latter-day Puritanism, lust in
the guise of love, prostitution within marriage, the evils of both
repression and brutish or premature expression, the abomination of
smirking elders and cowardly guardians, and so forth. Truly, these
things constitute a fad of today, but—Mrs. Havelock Ellis was writing
and preaching these ideas longer than twenty-five years ago. In
questions of love, marriage, and the possible beauty of human relations,
she is a splendid, unhurrying pioneer. It would be impossible to measure
the courage, the fine perseverance, it has taken to work on patiently
and forcefully in the midst of leering society, infallible
misunderstanding, and a great ocean of evil-mindedness. What daring! to
speak plainly of the beauty of love-passion. And how hopeless! Here,
evolution endlessly proves itself a laggard process.
Until one hears Mrs. Ellis it is easy to overestimate the “building”
powers of Emma Goldman, although it is always too easy to consider only
Miss Goldman’s sturdy “wrecking” capacity. But the percentage of
constructive element in Mrs. Ellis’s work is much more apparent than in
Miss Goldman’s. Clearly, each woman is superlative in her own sphere. By
virtue of its tested strength, Mrs. Ellis’s constructive machinery may
be said to destroy naturally whatever gets in its way. And in addition
to this she does some direct, incisive battling as well. Her humor has
carbolic in it. Her sarcasm is a spiritual antiseptic.
In the realm of the child, Mrs. Ellis agrees with that grand Swedish
woman—Ellen Key. These two coincide upon the supreme importance of full
and proper education for the coming generation, including eugenics,
hygiene, and kindred topics. It is a joy to know of so much sanity
abroad in the world.
But even today, when a number of more or less important writers and
speakers are taking up her ideas, when Chicago is having the truths of
humanity forced down its tonsilitic throat, it was still possible—on a
Sunday night in the Little Theatre—for Mrs. Ellis to have in her
audience many whose deep sighs of boredom it was scarcely necessary to
observe before tagging them as a lower class of mentality, while no
doubt their jewels and furs were quite necessary to indicate their
social standing. What curious gropings of psychology brought these
people to such a lecture? Or was it fashion? In the faces of these might
a dozen Saviours have found ample pity-material. Yawns and dull looks!
Something between a Cross and a Bomb was wanting to awaken these
unthinking ones, asleep while superb ideas—ideas of admirable vitality
and development—were being put before them by the clear and earnest
voice of a great woman.
What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and
evil.—_Nietzsche._
London Letter
EDWARD SHANKS
_London, Dec. 1, 1914._
I have to humiliate myself at the beginning of this letter. Nietzsche
did not provoke the war; he did not imagine there was ever any
specifically “Teutonic” culture, worthy of being spread at any cost; and
he seems to have disliked Prussia as much or more than I do. I say this
not to inform the readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW, who know it all already
from the number in which my error appeared, but to unburden my soul. I
sinned like a daily journalist and spoke from hearsay—for I confess I
have never been able to read Nietzsche with sufficient attention to gain
more than a vague notion of his ideas. Two persons set me right—Mr.
Harold Monro, the editor of _Poetry and Drama_, with some heat and
indignation, and, more gently, Mr. A. R. Orage, the editor of _The New
Age_, who was in old days one of the first to bring Nietzsche to
England. It would seem that his efforts were of little use, for my
blunder was merely an incident in a carnival of misapprehension which is
now engaging our pseudo-intellectual critics. I have sinned in numerous,
if evil, company.
I must withdraw another statement—namely, that the war has produced no
adequate and agreeable verse. Mr. Maurice Hewlett’s _Sing-songs of the
War_ (published by the Poetry Bookshop) is an admirable little volume.
Wisely pitching his note neither too high nor too vulgarly, he has
struck closer to the mark than he has ever in any attempt. He has
achieved an excellent patriotic song, beginning
O, England is an island,
The fairest ever seen:
They say men come to England
To learn that grass is green.
That needs only supporting music to be a fine song of the pleasant
boisterousness and exaggeration that it should be. Of the others, _The
Drowned Sailor_ and _Soldier, Soldier_, have caught a wonderful and
touching note of the folk-song. Mr. Hewlett’s work here is not
ambitious, he has profited enormously by not keeping in his mind the
necessity of producing a fine piece of literature. He has tried honestly
to produce “something that will do” and much good poetry has been
written in that way.
Mr. Harold Monro’s new book, _Children of Love_, which he has published
himself at the Poetry Bookshop, contains also four gloomy war poems as
far removed from Mr. Hewlett’s as from the verse of the newspapers. They
are vivid and real impressions of fighting and, as appeals for
recruiting, enormously inapt. But poetry does not exist for that. The
title poem is a lovely piece, Mr. Monro’s very best, the composition
which settled, or should have settled, all our doubts concerning his
genius. The others display that sombre misery which is the
characteristic note of his writing, which is extremely uncomfortable
and, after a little while, extremely impressive.
I may seem to have devoted too much space to the publications of the
Poetry Bookshop. But I think that, with luck, as time goes on, it may
bulk yet more largely in English letters. Mr. Monro, if he is careful,
may have the position that the _Mercure de France_ held in Paris until
quite recently: that is, he may publish about ninety per cent of all the
good poetry that is published.
The war—again—disturbing our lives as a great tidal wave disturbs sea
and shore, has brought to the surface, as waves will, many things of
beauty. Among these, one that is not regarded, is Thomas Hardy’s
_Dynasts_, which has been abridged and produced by Mr. Granville Barker.
It is printed in three volumes and nineteen acts, with innumerable
choruses and semi-choruses. Mr. Barker has reduced the play to three
acts and the chorus to two persons who sit enthroned, one on each side
of the stage. Mr. Henry Ainley sits at a reading-desk lower down in
front and declaims the descriptive stage-directions. The setting is a
conventional design in grey to which slight additions are made from time
to time, but which remains for the most part unchanged. Thus you see the
men and women of Wessex in fear of invasion by “Boney,” the victory and
death of Nelson, the death and burial of Sir John Moore, Wellington at
Salamanca, Napoleon signing his abdication at Fontainebleau, Wellington
and Napoleon at Waterloo. The Napoleon was bad: he laughed sardonically
in the fashion of melodrama, but the play transcended him. The tragedy
was profoundly moving, the comedy not less so. It is an extraordinary
work, written in Mr. Hardy’s graceless style, and probably the greatest
of his compositions. One thing only was wanting—an audience. That which
is essentially impressive must have something to impress—the listeners
have a place in a good play—and the grandeur of the occasion was
sensibly diminished. When we went, we asked the box-office attendant if
we might go in at half-price, on account of our uniforms, and he
answered indifferently that “we might if we liked.” When we got in, we
understood. There were about two rows in the stalls and two more in the
pit. The boxes were empty as far as I could see. I cannot understand the
English public. What more do they want now than to see Nelson on the
_Victory_ and Wellington at Waterloo? Is it a cause of offence to them
that the play is by a great man?
New York Letter
GEORGE SOULE
If I were a Japanese journalist looking for notoriety, I should
translate sections from Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Richmond
P. Hobson, _et al._, and publish them under the title “America and the
Next War.” There is no question that these gentlemen put together are
ten times as influential in the United States as von Bernhardi was in
Germany. And there is no question that their utterances are just as
inciting to militarism. If to them were added editorials from the Hearst
newspapers, with their millions of circulation, and the books of certain
prominent army officers, no one could convince the Japanese that the
United States is not a conceited, hot-headed, and militarist nation.
After the outbreak of a war we should plead in vain that we are
peace-loving and fight only in self-defence. “Have you not the second
largest navy in the world?” the Japanese would say. “Was any nation
threatening you? Did you not capture the Philippines by force and subdue
them against their will, practicing against the innocent natives
horrible atrocities? Would you not do the same to Japan if you had the
chance? Fortunately we are forewarned, and seize a favorable occasion to
free the Philippines, since you have broken your promise to give them
independence.” And we should feel that the Japanese were monsters hiding
their aggressive spirit under humanitarian humbug.
Most of us have forgotten the spasm of “divine mission” that swept over
this country at the time of the Spanish-American war. We were appointed
by God to conquer or absorb the world, and bestow upon it, willing or
unwilling, our American _Kultur_. “Civilization” was, indeed, the
precise word we used, although we sometimes varied it with “free
institutions.” At the same time the beef trust was furnishing “embalmed
beef” to the army, and our economic system was at its very depth of
unsavoriness. The Spanish papers cartooned us, quite justly, as “the
American hog,” and the cartoons were reproduced broadcast over this
country to feed the fires of hate. A Spaniard became to us the very
impersonation of demoniacal cruelty. The country ran high with the spy
fever, while the Atlantic coast waited in some trepidation for the
imagined approach of Cervera’s squadron. We were prey to all the
grinning illusions of war.
European opinion was at this time largely against us. To most Europeans
we seemed a combination of pious humbug and bumptious conceit. To be
actively dangerous we should have needed only a powerful armament. As it
was, they regarded us with only distant apprehension. But they were not
for a moment deceived by our high-sounding phrases. We were the most
dollar-worshipping nation in the world, had often proved ourselves so.
They recalled the unpleasant experiences they had had at the hands of
Americans—vulgar tourists. The thing was perfectly obvious. We had
little fineness of feeling. What we were fighting for was really dollars
and cents, not the freedom of subject peoples. At this time they set
themselves to watch us very carefully. Canada and the rest of America
shared their feelings, with more bitterness.
Since then there has been little visible and striking change. We still
live under an inchoate and un-idealistic commercialism. The world can
thank us for very few treasures of literature, philosophy, or art. Not a
single great nation has any particular occasion to love us. To most of
them we are blasphemous and hateful. Hearst has more millions and more
newspapers than ever, and we are still subject to strong popular
hysteria—such as the recently-shown hatred of Germany. We sit as judges
on the world. We calmly assume that we could do no such terrible things
as other nations; that our _Kultur_ is the best. At any time we may
again be ready to spread it by force of arms.
Now all the powerful nations of the world, except us, are weakening each
other in a terrific struggle. The occasion is seized in America by the
armament makers and a political party without an issue. To defend
ourselves we must arm! they say. Anyone who has taken the trouble to
read Bernhardi’s books will know that it is the precise argument he
employed. Political parties under commercialism are unscrupulous, and we
shall doubtless see the agitation raised to a national issue. Anything
to get the Democrats out of office. The probability is that the hysteria
will succeed. The only hope to the contrary is that it may be allayed,
not by opposition, but by prompt action on the part of the
administration which shall mend our present fences without committing us
to any definite policy of armament.
Suppose, however, that a President should be elected on the issue of
larger armament immediately after the European war. It is an insult to
the intelligence to pursue the logic of events further. The “defensive”
alliance against us, the “defensive” alliance for us—if, indeed we could
induce anybody to enter one—the constantly-increasing tension, the
_casus belli_, the repetition of history. But such a disastrous war
would not be a tragedy if we had so deserved it. The tragedy would be
that we should have no such intrinsic worth as has Germany to offer as a
defence. The tragedy would be that we had been so concerned about the
mote in our brother’s eye that we had failed to remove the beam in our
own.
I Am Woman
MARGUERITE SWAWITE
I am woman:
Old as Lebanon cedars—and far older;
Young as the freshest green shoot
That peeps through the snow in the March time.
My face is turned to the East
Pink with the dawn of my promise;
My hands are clutched from behind
By the fettering fingers of her who was woman alone,
Molded and spurred by desire,
Knowing only the need
Of a kiss for the cup of her throat,
Of a child for the curve of her arm.
To-day I am woman,
Less—yet a little more;
For I am learning to sing
Not his, nor another’s, but mine own song,
That has lain in my heart since the first day.
A great golden song it shall be
Though not always soft with sweet cadence,
For I must travail to sing:
I am learning
To feed upon nothing, yet fill me;
To warm my chill limbs without fire;
To go on my way, without kiss, without child,
Though my lip is red, my arm willing.
Yet I know I shall never cease
Till I have sung it all—
All to the very last note.
Still I shall be woman
In all the long days to come
That beckon to me in the pink dawn;
My song shall grow sweetly familiar,
And he who was frightened shall draw near
Singing his separate song,
Ever his own and yet blending
Its virile strains with mine;
So we shall raise a great harmony
Enfolding the world in our music,
Rejoicing again in our marriage.
One day that shall be ....
But to-day
I am weary—
The East is rosy with promise of dawn.
(_The following is one of the poems in Edgar Lee Master’s
“Spoon River Anthology” which has been running in Reedy’s
St. Louis Mirror and attracting such wide-spread attention.
In our opinion it is in the first ranks of fine poetry._)
Caroline Branson
With our hearts like drifting suns, had we but walked
As often before the April fields till star-light
Silkened over with viewless gauze the darkness
Under the rock, our trysting place in the wood,
Where the brook turns! Had we but passed from wooing
Like notes of music that run together, into winning
In the inspired improvisation of love!
But to put back of us as a canticle ended
The rapt enchantment of the flesh,
In which our souls swooned, down, down,
Where time was not, nor space, nor ourselves—
Annihilated in love!
To leave these behind for a room with lamps;
And to stand with our Secret mocking itself,
And hiding itself amid flowers and mandolins,
Stared at by all between salad and coffee.
And to see him tremble, and feel myself
Prescient, as one who signs a bond—
Not flaming with gifts and pledges heaped
With rosy hands over his brow.
And then, O night! deliberate! unlovely!
With all of our wooing blotted out by the winning
In a chosen room in an hour that was known to all.
Next day he sat so listless, almost cold,
So strangely changed, wondering why I wept,
Till a kind of sick despair and voluptuous madness
Seized us to make the pact of death.
A stalk of the earth sphere,
Frail as star-light,
Waiting to be drawn once again
Into creation’s stream.
But next time to be given birth
Gazed at by Raphael and St. Francis
Sometimes as they pass.
For I am their little brother,
To be known clearly face to face
Through a cycle of birth hereafter run.
You may know the seed and the soil;
You may feel the cold rain fall.
But only the earth-sphere, only heaven
Knows the secret of the seed
In the nuptial chamber under the soil.
Throw me into the stream again,
Give me another trial—
Save me, Shelley!
Music
The Kneisel Quartet and Hofmannized Chopin
ALBERT SPALDING
What more felicitous combination could be desired than this: Albert
Spalding playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, with the Thomas
Orchestra! Twice, four thousand people were warmed to genuine
enthusiasm; and at both the Friday and Saturday concerts the orchestra
men (whose utterly bored manner is their usual tribute) awakened and
showed the strongest appreciation for the young man’s art. Frederick
Stock beamed, fatherly, while he clapped his hands.
The displayers of sophisticated conceit and blasé judgment still choose
to regard Albert Spalding as a student. Their criticism, superficial as
it is, might have been based upon his playing of three or more years
back, when, along with the most marked talent, there was an element of
the conservatoire in his work. But the pupil has disappeared, and there
is now purely the artistic individual. And it follows naturally that,
for these same critics, unless one draws from a violin a tone as big as
a string bass, it cannot be beautiful.
For his two Chicago appearances he chose a work which is completely
suited to him. Spalding can play Mendelssohn. This composer, with his
happy delicacy, beauty, and rhythmic finesse, was safe in the hands of
the artist. A sturdier or a more sensuous fiddler might have soiled the
concerto. For Spalding is a spiritual aristocrat, a musician whose tonal
excellencies are not florid, but elegant; not passionate, but of a fine
intensity.
Technic?—One speaks of technic only when there is too much or too
little. Albert Spalding has, at the age of twenty-six, learned the
supreme art of self-expression; and both the self which he expresses and
the medium he employs for it are of the first order of fine things.
HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
Book Discussion
Love’s Highway
_Love and the Soul Maker_, by Mary Austin. [D. Appleton and Company,
New York.]
There is a certain generic myth, outcropping whenever the discovery of
some mysterious, hidden treasure is in question, which is that the
discoverer may possess only so much of it as he can carry away on his
own person. Whenever I met this climax in my childish reading my greedy
little soul rebelled because the hero might not have all that his eyes
could see instead of the negligible bit that he could handle with his
own muscles. Experience has taught that under no circumstances can a man
own more than he possesses within himself; this is as true of material
art forms as it is of culture and education. It is almost tragic in its
truth when we look about and see such a wealth of apparent happiness and
love and then look into our own impoverished hearts. We may not covet
either our neighbor’s automobile or his wife, but frequently we do
covet, in spite of good intentions, the happiness that he derives from
that automobile and that wife. Particularly weak are we when we look
down love’s highway and see what we believe to be limitless and ideal
joy. The little orbit in which we move seems sadly askew, and it takes a
book like Mary Austin’s _Love and the Soul Maker_ to make us understand
that all the topsy-turviness of the present is but the labor-pain of a
saner, truer, happier future.
The author combines science and sentiment in a new way. Her facts show
that she has read widely; her conclusions show that she has thought
deeply; her sentiments show that she has felt—at least potentially—most,
if not all, of the joys and sorrows which the practice and malpractice
of love produce. And the one shining truth that she has discovered in
all this hidden treasure of sex happiness is that “_we’ve a right to as
much love as we can work up into the stuff of a superior personality_.”
This truth is thrown out as independently of conventions, prejudices,
religious beliefs or practices as a searchlight is independent of the
hinges that hold it in place. It is the ultimate measure of what is good
or what is bad in love; it is the standard by which all sex problems
must finally be adjusted. She goes on to say that “taking anything over
what we can give back in some form or other to the social sum is my
notion of sinning”—and an inspired notion of sinning it is, too. We are
all searching for the treasure of love happiness, yet no one may justly
take more than he can carry away in inspiration and the impulse of
creating something within or without that will add to the sum total of
human happiness.
Between facts and sentiment Mrs. Austin leans to sentiment—yet why not?
She is not writing for the elect body of sex students, but for ordinary
men and women. Those who have read little or nothing of sex psychology
would find cold, uncompromising facts too difficult a diet. Offering
them such an argument would be like comforting a bumped child with the
multiplication table. By means of such a book as _Love and the Soul
Maker_ it may be possible for even the ossifying brains of dogmatists to
catch a glimmer of light on our present sex problems, while such
dazzlingly and ruthlessly true books as Havelock Ellis writes may
petrify several additional lobes.
Although not openly propagandic, Mrs. Austin has a decided philosophy of
life which she sets forth in a dozen different ways and which, without
saying so, she hopes her reader will accept. She insists that “the
proper end of loving is not personal but racial; it is the Soul Maker’s
most precious commodity,” and that love pirates or love grafters commit
their most venal sin by believing that love is its own excuse. As Mrs.
Austin expresses it, “Love for love’s sake is the shibboleth by which
they blunt the unassailable fact that love was not invented for love’s
sake but for life’s.” Here, of course, is a radical point of departure
which will turn many readers away from her pages; it may, however,
induce an equal number to read further.
The flaws in our modern system of marriage are more closely seen and
more cleverly pointed out than are the remedies offered. For example,
the author shows that modern society asks of marriage “things it was
never meant to pay”; yet her remedy is vague. And again: “The initial
mistake about marriage is in regarding it as a condition, a state, when
it is primarily a relation” and may exist in spite of very unfavorable
conditions and quite apart from them. Delightfully, indeed, does she
puncture the time-worn fallacy of platonic friendships: “I doubt that
there can be any informing intimacy between men and women unless there
exists also the potentiality of passionate experience.” Yet many of her
views are completely radical. “There never has been a time since man
stood up and knew himself for man,” she writes, “that the major process
of love has been reproductive,” and later she points out that “chief
among the uses of passion is the raising of the percentage of values in
those who entertain it.” She cuts off all the frills of convention,
ceremony, tradition; strips away all but the essential naked truth germ
and declares: “Marriage is an agreement between any pair to practice
mate-love toward one another, with intention.”
Marriage, thus simplified, would not, indeed could not, be the failure
which modern society so widely accepts with resignation instead of
combating with thoughtful dissatisfaction. We have become so racially
hypnotized that we do not distinguish between associated facts (such as
food, shelter, religious sanction, obedience, etc.) and the essential
truth of mate-love. “The primary obligation of lovers is to love,” she
says. This done, all will adjust itself; and yet lest any should draw
the over-quick conclusion that Mrs. Austin advocates free love, let me
also add that she says: “To love and to keep on loving. This is the one
way of making marriage do its work in the world.”
As a remedy she begs women to open their eyes to the fact that marriage
is not now the only career for them. That marriage does not fill the
lives of those who enter it is evidenced by the divorce courts.
Tentatively Mrs. Austin suggests that instead of dissolving so many
marriages it would be wiser to unload the excessive strain put upon
them. Let economics take hold of the problem of the mother, who for the
sake of providing bread for herself and her children crucifies her own
personality, ignores her own right to happiness upon the racial
conception of marriage. Very frankly she explains what marriage should
do for us: “First of all to satisfy the hunger of the body for its
natural mate ... and finally it must satisfy the need of companionship
on the intimate and personal side of life.” She hints that “it is
immensely more important that a mating pair should relish kissing
together than that they should both be Presbyterian.”
She is hopeful concerning the final abolishing of prostitution if the
present marriage customs are changed. She is emphatic in the need of
young people being enlightened in regard to marital experiences and
problems, but her suggestions are indefinite and inconclusive. However,
much may be overlooked for her emphasis of the fact that sex is an
active principal and that the best love-life is that which makes the
best use of love’s activities. She admonishes us to “play fair alike in
loving and unloving,” which means that love is not a light thing of a
day, but must be great enough and strong enough to control itself, even
to sacrifice itself for the greatest racial good—and never to sell
itself from a motive of personal selfishness, or for the bliss of an
hour.
The highway that Mrs. Austin lays out for love is rough and stony in
spots, and yet its goal of racial betterment through achievement as well
as by means of offspring is not to be despised.
MARY ADAMS STEARNS.
Dutch Bourgeoisie
_Small Souls_, by Louis Couperus. [Dodd, Mead and Company, New
York.]
Rain, rain.... It is always raining in Holland; the skies are ever
hidden behind muddy clouds, and in the damp, bleak atmosphere straggle
grey figures with stony faces. It is painful to follow Couperus through
the four hundred odd pages of his gloomy novel, to meet only “small
souls,” petty men and women whose sole interest lies in dinner parties
and endless gossip. Empty, tedious, stupid “society,” without even the
piquant vice that makes attractive the bourgeoisie of Balzac,
Maupassant, or Zola. The least boring figure among the asinine menagerie
is that of the heroine, Constance, whose sole virtue consists in the
fact that she had committed adultery in her early life. The author has
not brought in a single positive type of Holland’s artistic or
intellectual circles to counteract the general gloom of the picture; he
has evidently determined to hold his readers within the frame of a
family-epic, to focus their attention on one particular aspect of life
in the Hague, the shallowest, the palest. As this novel presents the
translation of the first part of the author’s tetralogy, we must be
patient and consider the book as a prelude to the developing drama.
Already we see at the end of this volume promising symptoms of a new,
real life, to be manifested in the growing boy, Adrian—big, healthy,
sturdy, who despises his petty relatives with their noisy intrigues, and
whose “boyish lips, with their faint shading of dawn, curve into a
scornful smile as he says: ‘It’s all about nothing!’” We shall eagerly
look forward to the following volumes, for Couperus is an artist, a deep
psychologist, a follower of Zola; his method may be old, arch-realistic,
but, as I say, he is an artist, hence thrilling.
K.
James Stephens: Poet and Pagan
_The Demi-Gods_, by James Stephens. [The Macmillan Company, New
York.]
God’s most high messengers and certain Irish loafers nest well together.
James Stephens was the first man to discern this and other plain, albeit
unique, facts; and in the _Demi-Gods_ he takes the reader into a
delightful confidence, telling him the inmost thoughts of three angels,
their two companions (also Irish), a philosophic donkey, an ecstatic
crow, and the like of them. The angels learn table-manners and similar
ethics from the two Celtic vagabonds, whom they chance upon when they
touch foot to earth, one dark night. The father-vagabond gets daily food
for the party, paying for it when he isn’t temperamentally swept into
stealing; the other, who is the dearest kind of an Irish girl, naturally
in love with the youngest angel, does the cooking and mothering for them
all,—and celestial wisdom is shelved during the acquirement of so much
worldly knowledge.
How can the astonishing charms of this book be described? In the first
place, there is poetry—neither cadent nor decadent poetry, but the sort
of prose that conveys the most finely imagined poetic thought. And there
is contrast. Such contrast! From the calm conversation of angels to the
braying of an ass is the easiest jump for Stephens. It is a gentle slide
from paragraphs of delicate dawn-picturing to a peasant’s narration of
brawls and thieving, or a description of the angels attired in Pat
McCann’s trousers. And, given the latitude of half a dozen quotations,
one might prove that this same Stephens was a deep-gazing mystic. Nor
would his extreme paganism be difficult to establish. But to avoid all
the inevitable shruggings of literary shoulders, if one really said
these things about the man, let it be quickly stated that James Stephens
is before all else an artist, a writer with a superlative sense of humor
and a pleasantly incomprehensible imagination.
While a deeper probing of his mysticism or paganism (as such) would
perhaps bring about a sudden discounting of his humor and his poetic
sensibilities, it is necessary to remember that Stephens is Irish, with
all the implied values of that temperament. Therefore, it is well to
consider the author of _The Demi-Gods_ to be this day’s most unique
literary light. The combination stands alone.
HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
Unfulfilled Expectations
_A Lady of Leisure_, by Ethel Sidgwick. [Small, Maynard and
Company, Boston.]
Long, diffuse, sometimes clever, sometimes pointless conversations mark
this latest book of an author from whom we had come to expect only the
best. Miss Sidgwick could not write anything that did not have passages
of keen insight and shrewd handling of our commonplace humanity, but
here their value is hidden under an avalanche of words—words—words. The
slight plot—which of course is no fault—deals with the whims of the
daughter of a great London surgeon. She overcomes parental objection and
enters a dressmaking establishment; but we are given no particularly
vital picture of this life. There are several young people whose love
affairs become mutually mixed, but ultimately untangled—all of which is
done by means of conversations, jerky, exclamatory, unrestrained. This
method is true to life because such chatter is exactly the way modern
people talk, but nevertheless our ears ache with it, and we find
ourselves longing for a paragraph of straightaway description or
narration, which never comes.
The frivolous and empty atmosphere is all well enough for a relish, but
it is unsatisfying as a total, particularly from one who can give too
much that is worth while. It is like a continuous afternoon tea, or a
lemon meringue pie with nothing but the meringue.
M. A. S.
Interpretation of Music
_Nature in Music_, by Lawrence Gilman. [John Lane Company, New
York.]
Its thin divine kinkiness ...
I felt it undulate my soul—
Lavender water, pitted and heaved to huge, uneasy circles.
The readers of THE LITTLE REVIEW may remember these lines: they were
meant to interpret Debussy. I challenge Llewellyn Jones to “object” to
this gem and to question its “sense”! The staunchest conservative will
agree that of all arts music presents the widest liberty for subjective
interpretation, especially for such an autonomous artist as a poet.
“There is some music which should be described by poets rather than
exposed by inquisitive aestheticians. Of such is the magical music of
Debussy.” This from Lawrence Gilman’s latest book. Mr. Gilman evidently
considers himself a good member in both categories, for he follows up
the quoted remark with unrestrained effusions of colorful descriptions
of Landscape-music, Sea-music, Death-music. It is charming reading,
though at times the unbridled Pegasus causes you dizziness; not that you
are encountered with daringly-new views or dazzling ideas: Mr. Gilman is
too much of an American for such extravagance. It is the manner of his
exposition, the ravishing richness of his style, that endangers your
mental equilibrium. Judge for yourself:
Debussy, when he wrote this delectable and adorable music
(_Rondes de Printemps_), sent his spirit into the woods and
fields, through gardens and orchards and petal-showered lanes,
and upon the moors and hills; he trod the brown soil of the
earth, but he also looked long up into the green branches and the
warm, gusty sky of May, and savored the fragrant winds.
Is it not enchanting? But when you are treated to such nectar on nearly
every page, you sigh for the elegant, reserved Romain Rolland, who
expresses his enthusiasm for Debussy in a cooler, yet by no means less
convincing, way.
Aside from this purely external characteristic the book contains very
interesting remarks on the treatment of natural elements and phenomena
by various composers. The invention of new instruments, the development
of the art of orchestration, and general new conceptions of our age,
have drawn a sharp line of distinction between the old and the new
interpretations of nature in music. While the old composers (among the
old the author places not only Hayden and Beethoven, but also Wagner and
Grieg) approached Nature either as a subject to be faithfully rendered,
or as a provocator of direct emotional reactions in themselves, to the
new composers (Debussy, d’Indy, Loeffler, MacDowell) Nature “is a
miraculous harp, an instrument of unlimited range and inexhaustible
responsiveness, upon which the performer may improvise at his pleasure,”
to quote the inimitable original. The classification is rather
hazardous; the importance of Loeffler is greatly exaggerated, but as a
purely subjective view the work of Mr. Gilman is interesting.
K.
A Pasteurized “Man and Superman”
_The Raft_, by Coningsby Dawson. [Henry Holt and Company, New
York.]
_The Raft_ is based on the same idea as Shaw’s—_minus_ moral shocks,
mental exhilaration, and the Superman. The theory is served as strong
drink in the one, as good boy’s tea in the other. The same idea receives
such different treatment that the person who would pronounce _Man and
Superman_ a “corrupt play” might speak of _The Raft_, as a beautiful
story, provided a few courageous truths which it was necessary for the
author to state in order to refute, could be forgiven. It is a harmless
compromise between the belief that no literature has a right to exist
that is not suitable for a girl in her teens, and the conviction that
men and women must face life as it is.
In _The Raft_, we read this figurative suggestion of the theory:
We’re girls adrift on a raft and we can’t swim. Over there’s the
land of marriage with the children, the homes and the husbands;
we’ve no means of getting to it. Unless some of the men see us
and put out in boats to our rescue, we’ll be swept into the
hunger of mid-ocean. But they’re too busy to notice us.... Always
wanting, wanting, wanting the things that only men can give....
Did men ever want to be married or was it always necessary to
catch them?
In _Man and Superman_ we find a more liberal statement:
To a woman, a man is only a means to the end of getting children
and rearing them. Vitality in woman is a blind fury of creation.
What other work has she in life but to get a husband? It is a
woman’s business to get married as soon as possible, and a man’s
to keep unmarried as long as he can.... You think that you are
the pursuer, and she pursued. Fool, it is you who are the
pursued, the destined prey.
During the last few years stories and plays exploiting this doctrine
have been hurled thick and fast in the attempt to batter down so-called
romantic love, romantic though fortified not only by the fancies of the
poets and novelists but also by the analyses of the scientists and the
experiences of life. According to these stories, love is nothing more or
less than a passion for reproduction, a desire for children. This idea
is being emphasized by two very different types for two very different
reasons: one tries to make a Don Quixote of romantic love and hopes by
ridicule to eliminate it as the great motive and to give some of the
other passions a chance in literature; the other considers everything
even suggestive of sex unmoral, and so searches for an excuse to justify
the gratification of a natural craving. Neither satire nor platitudes
can alter nature.
Love, they say, considered as intense personal affection is an idea
purely fanciful, romantic. If so to consider it is romantic, scientists
are romantic; for such men as Lankester and Pycraft say “the view that
the sequel of mate hunger is the dominant instinct has no foundation in
fact. Desire for the sake of the pleasure of its gratification, not its
consequences, is the only hold on life which any race possesses. Love is
the attribute upon which this preservation of the race depends.”
In other words it is a case of cause and effect. That the joy of
motherhood is greater than any other joy in a woman’s life has
absolutely nothing to do with the question as to whether or not the hope
of that joy was the reason for the selection of a mate. The question is
not one of superiority but priority; not which is the greater, but which
came first; which is the cause and which the effect. If the desire for
children is the cause of what we call love, the only logical outcome is
that in selection any woman could not refuse any man fit to be the
father of her children on the ground that he did not appeal to her
personally. Life does not support such a conclusion.
Why woman’s choice is not impersonal is only one of the many things that
cannot be explained by the theory that makes her desire for children the
sole cause of attraction. It does not explain too many things: faithless
wives, some childless marriages, children found on door-steps,
abortions, some prostitution, why some women never marry for fear of
children, or why man is not the coy, reluctant, elusive creature
defined, though not pictured, by Dawson and Shaw.
No wonder it fails to explain; for children, instead of being the whole
cause are the result of only a part of the cause, mate hunger—a hunger
of body, mind, and spirit. Love is the feeling for the one that seems to
supply those needs, the impulse toward that one. The sooner we realize
that the attraction between men and women is not all physical any more
than it is all mental and spiritual, and that sex is in all three
phases, the sooner shall we reach the truth; the sooner shall we hear
the last of one type that prudishly denies physical attraction or else
tries to “purify” it by making it a means to an end, and of the other
type that sees in marriage only physical union.
The theory will not stand either a logical or an emotional test. Not
only can it not explain this confusion of cause and effect, this
mistaking the part of love for its whole; but it also cannot answer why
it should look to the future for a cause when love is so vitally a thing
of the present; nor why it was ever thought necessary to find any
explanation outside of itself for the attraction between men and women.
If there is any passion in the world that does not need a justification
other than its mere existence, it is love. For though realizing the
exaltation of moral passion, the exhilaration of mental passion, no one
can deny that it is through love we know intense, vivid personal
happiness—happiness that is vibrant, full of color, rapturous.
But it is absurd to try to analyze it; it is even more so to argue about
it: but really women have grown very tired of having men tell them why
they marry, tired of this confusion of result with cause, of a part with
the whole, tired of the belittling of love by people who have never
experienced it, tired of this sex obsession. It is doubly absurd to
waste time in arguing when the best argument I can offer against the
Raft theory is the book itself, where the author spends most of his time
disproving his own definitely-stated idea through the actions of his
characters. It is interesting to see that both Dawson and Shaw should,
by methods diametrically opposite, show how fallacious is their
statement by exactly the same circumstance,—that is, by having the woman
care passionately for _the_ man, not _a_ man. That fact alone routs the
whole theory. Certainly Cherry and Jehane have very decided personal
preferences regardless of the next generation; moreover the Golden Woman
and “heaps of other well-bred women” will not marry for fear of
children; and Peter, Ockey, and the Faun Man insist on being ardent
lovers that vainly pursue.
Notwithstanding these contradictions throughout the book, the author
keeps on bravely and inartistically reiterating his Raft motives, as if
to keep up his courage. Possibly because he realizes that he is losing
his theme, he starts another which is really the one consistently
developed. This second theme is that love is never reciprocal: that at
the best it is a case of one loving, the other allowing; that usually it
is a case of one loving and the other not even allowing. He starts an
endless chain of unrequited affection: Glory loves Peter; Peter loves
Cherry; Cherry, the Faun Man; the Faun the Golden Woman; the Golden
Woman, herself—or is it Peter? That is one chain; and another is Ockey
loves Jehane; Jehane, Barrington; Barrington, Nan.
These two themes working at cross purposes are typical of the book which
is a mass of contradictions of this author’s own definitely expressed
ideas, and of life. So many things do not ring true: the labored,
morbid, commonplace treatment of Peter, “the ’maginative child,” as an
exponent of the artistic temperament; the lack of love as the sole cause
of Ockey’s failure, when he needs so many other things to make a man of
him; the marriage of Nan and Barrington as the ideal union, when neither
one has a nature intense enough to feel a great love, when even such
love as they know has never been put to the merciless tests that life
uses; the brooding, year in and year out, of the unmarried women over
the loss of the joys of motherhood, and their lack of interest in any
other phase of life; Jehane’s unworthiness, emphasized by the author in
person and through his characters, when her actions with different
treatment might have made her almost a heroine; the declared finality of
so many things that are really only initial steps; platitudes as answers
to the vital questions of life.
Most of these false notes come from the fact that the theories of the
author and the actions of his characters are not in harmony. Whenever I
hear writers talking of such discords and saying that they are obliged
to let their characters work out their own salvations, I always consider
the attitude an affectation. But I have changed my mind. Dawson seems to
be left alone on his Raft, shouting his untenable theories till he is
hoarse; while his characters, ignoring him, have reached land and are
living their own lives. I found myself in the absurd position of
resenting the author’s interference with those vivid, distinctive,
powerful characters he had created; of wanting to tell him to keep his
hands off, and let them tell their own story.
And left to themselves they tell it unflinchingly. What if the treatment
is obvious and conventional? It is obvious treatment of the great
mysteries of life; conventional treatment of its beauties.
The advancement of science at the expense of man is one of the
most pernicious things in the world. The stunted man is a
retrogression in the human race: he throws a shadow over all
succeeding generations. The tendencies and natural purpose of the
individual science become degenerate, and science itself is
finally shipwrecked: it has made progress, but has either no
effect at all on life or else an immoral one.—_Nietzsche._
Sentence Reviews
_Gustave Flaubert_, by Emile Faguet. _Balzac_, by the same author.
[Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.] Emile Faguet is a critic of the old
school, an academician. He analyzes the writers thoroughly, profoundly,
comprehensively, applying a uniform scholarly method. He gives the
biographies of Flaubert and Balzac, reviews their works, and finally
discusses their general importance for literature. You do not find any
sparkling revelations or extraordinary insight, but you form an adequate
opinion of the chief characteristics of the two great Frenchmen. The
translations are good; Mr. Thorley, who did the Balzac, has proved that
in the rôle of a translator he runs less risk than when undertaking to
interpret Verlaine.
_Bahaism: The Modern Social Religion_, by Horace Holley. [Mitchell
Kennerley, New York.] Another example of overestimation of Oriental
thought. The success of Tagore’s second-rate allegories gave Mr. Holley
the idea of displaying before the ever-thirsting Western mind another
Eastern “great”. Bahaism, as interpreted by the writer, is one of the
“57 varieties” of the blessed Christian Socialism. The world must be
reformed, nicely, humbly, altruistically, without causing any damage to
State and Society. Naive and dull like a Sunday sermon at an Ethical
Society.
_Woman and War_, by Olive Schreiner. [Frederick A. Stokes Company, New
York.] A timely pamphlet, reprinted as a fragment from the famous book
_Woman and Labor_. The author claims that woman can carry on war as well
as man, considering modern war implements; but as a sculptor would
resent the idea of hurling his creations on the ramparts to stop the
breaches made by the enemy, so does the human child-bearer instinctively
antagonize the reckless destruction of that which she has at so much
cost produced; for “men’s bodies are our woman’s work of art.”
_Appearances_, by G. Lowes Dickinson. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New
York.] The title vindicates the author’s superficiality. Impressions of
India, China, Japan, America, are bewilderingly crowded in a dazzling
bouquet, revealing charming brilliance on the part of the observer, but
lack of profound insight. A rapidly-changing panorama of faces and
places, a cinematograph. “All America is Niagara. Force without
direction, noise without significance, speed without accomplishment.”
Such aphorisms lavishly scattered throughout the pages make the book
ideal train reading.
_Psychology General and Applied_, by Hugo Münsterberg. [D. Appleton and
Company, New York.] This new text-book by the Harvard professor
summarizes various aspects of psychology and will be of help to the
student who seeks facts rather than speculation. Mr. Münsterberg is at
his best when he deals with a college audience; his reputation and
prestige would be quite safe if he limited his activity to that field
and did not indulge in pro-German pamphleteering.
_The Story-Life of Napoleon_, by Wayne Whipple. [The Century Company,
New York.] The life of the “Man of Destiny” is an inexhaustible source
for historians and biographers. Mr. Whipple has compiled a new biography
of the Corsican, based exclusively on stories and anecdotes as related
by various authorities. Those for whom Napoleon is the grandest
phenomenon in history will feel grateful to the author for his enormous
work performed lovingly and inspiringly.
_Stories from Northern Myths_, by Emilie Kip Baker. [The Macmillan
Company, New York.] I enjoy reading Greek mythology in spring, Hindu
legends in summer, the Bible at any time, Norse sagas in winter nights.
This book is a skillful composition of the most interesting myths of the
North, written with irresistible charm. It is ideal reading in the
blissful moments of mental relaxation, when you dismiss temporarily all
“problems” and plunge into the enchanting abyss of the Non-Real.
_The Architecture of Humanism_, by Geofry Scott. [Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston.] A cold, merciless wielding of the scythe that the
author admits is dogmatic criticism. Even the crucified Ruskin has more
thorns added to his crown; but still we fail to see the object of this
book in holding up all architectural ideals as “fallacies”.
_Father Ralph_, by Gerald O’Donovan. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]
Ralph O’Brien was born to be a priest. One might almost say, considering
his mother’s attitude, that he was a priest before he was born, and his
bringing up was single-eyed to that end. Only as he grows older does he
begin to find flaws in the supposedly flawless church of God. Then as he
brings his keen young mind to these problems he fights against the
religious decadence of Ireland, and causes the author’s pen to rush
along through a torrent of socialistic and revolutionary indignation.
_Balshazzar Court_; or, Village Life in New York City, by Simon
Strumsky. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.] These eight connected
essays concern the modern apartment house filled with strange families
which become linked together by the telegraphy of domestics; the street,
Broadway, teeming with its interest in unnatural things; with the show
which one knows perfectly beforehand through the kindness of the
newspaper reporters; and others. The author sees the unimportant trifles
that make up urban life, and lifts them into whimsical prominence.
_The Wonderful Romance_, by Pierre de Coulevain. [Dodd, Mead and
Company, New York.] “To America, country of new thoughts”—thus does the
author dedicate her last book. Almost as if she could foresee her death,
Mlle. Fabre (Pierre de Coulevain was her pen name) wrote of conclusions
and impressions long stored up in her brain. Like her previous books,
this is a collection of thoughts and observations set down in a charming
but desultory way.
_To-Day’s Daughter_, by Josephine Daskam Bacon. [D. Appleton and
Company, New York.] _To-Day’s Daughter_ is an utterly American book
dealing with our peculiar present-day problems. Mrs. Bacon forces no
conclusions upon the reader, for each case is “different.” The author
limits her modern woman in no way except to make her choose one purpose
and to show her that she cannot be a dozen different women and achieve
success in all directions. She proves that woman must have a cohering
line, a central motive to which other things are subservient, and a due
regard to the environment where Fate has placed her.
_Lucas’ Annual_, edited by E. V. Lucas. [The Macmillan Company, New
York.] Of course, the correct literary pose toward even the best
“collections” is one of indulgent condescension. Nevertheless, we must
admit that in Lucas’s collection Ruskin’s criticism of one of Browning’s
poems gives us a good laugh and an intellectual challenge; that Barrie’s
_Hyphen_ and the prize novel, _Spoof_, are clever satires on literary
style; that Browning’s letter emphasizes what we felt while prying into
the Browning Letters: that our self-respect could never again be the
same;—that as a whole the book appeals to our sense of humor and to our
literary taste.
_Nothing Else Matters_, by William Samuel Johnson. [Mitchell Kennerley,
New York.] That jaded epithet, “like champagne,” should have been
reserved for this novel, for it bubbles and sparkles and leaves a
luxurious taste in one’s literary mouth; and, while under its
pleasurable influence, one is eager to declare that heroines of today
should all bear resemblance to the charming little human who laughs and
loves through these pages.
_The Bird-Store Man_, by Norman Duncan. [Fleming H. Revell Company, New
York.] The old, Sabbath-scented story, practically told by the title, is
in this case partially redeemed by a binding of tan, cream, and pale
green.
_Altogether Jane_, by Herself. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] When a
sane, intelligent woman speaks frankly and cleverly, with neither lush
nor morbidity, the public owes itself the pleasure of hearing her; and,
given that hearing, Jane, in this healthy chronicle, will be found
convincing.
_Personality Plus_, by Edna Ferber. [Frederick A. Stokes Company, New
York.] One or two personalities plus slang raised to the nth power minus
profundity gives the readable, salable unit which Edna Ferber presents
in this story of a blossoming college chap.
_The True Ulysses S. Grant_, by Gen. Charles King. [J. B. Lippincott
Company, Philadelphia.] Some patriotic hawker should get the idea and
the permission to sell this informative volume at that sight-seen tomb
on Riverside Drive, for Grant can’t have too many friends.
_Nancy the Joyous_, by Edith Stowe. [Reilly and Britton, Chicago.]
Nancy, one animated beam of bookish sunlight, is just too sweet and
frank and “wholesome” for anything—even to read.
_The Torch Bearer_, by Reina Melcher Marquis. [D. Appleton and Company,
New York.] Once again the reader is asked to consider a married woman
with a talent—a situation which has become epidemic. In this case the
plot is too big for the writer’s ability and the whole story is shallow
and sketchy.
_Selina_, by George Madden Martin. [D. Appleton and Company.] Like so
many writers who achieve a first success, Mrs. Martin has not done
nearly so well with Selina as she did with Emmy Lou. Selina is natural
but colorless. The Mid-Victorian setting (which is repeatedly
emphasized) is of Mid-Victorian mediocrity. The plot is merely a series
of unstartling incidents.
_Essays.—Political and Historical_, by Charlemagne Tower. [J. B.
Lippincott Company, Philadelphia.] Those who have been taught to believe
government is the most important thing in our existence and is an
institution founded on truth, justice and human needs will if they read
this book at all sincerely, close it in wonder. Despite the “skill and
thoroughness” with which the book is written one cannot help questioning
the meaning of all this petty, diplomatic scheming and complicated
governmental legislating.
_Coasting Bohemia_, by J. Comyns Carr. [The Macmillan Company, New
York.] Essays, some of which appeared in an English daily, the real
value and literary worth of which compel us, who live in America, to
realize our lack of journalistic criticism. Millais, Alma-Tadema,
Burne-Jones, Whistler, and many others are written about in a manner
that surely must have aided in public understanding and appreciation.
_Anne Feversham_, by J. C. Snaith. [D. Appleton and Company, New York.]
“Delightful,” “charming,” “entertaining,” and all the rest of the usual
publishers’ adjectives for usual books. They try to justify this one
because of its historical background, which, however, is too slight to
save it.
_The Commodore_, by Maud Howard Peterson. [Lothrop, Lee and Shepard
Company, Boston.] A lean-on-me-Grandpapa little boy, plenty of
sentiment, a style which some people consider adorable, incidents of
wholesome morality pinned to a background of naval stations and marine
affairs, make this a book which the young may read with impunity—and, if
young enough, with satisfaction and a grim resolve to go and do
likewise.
_The Grand Assize_, by Hugh Carton. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New
York.] Milton built a heaven for his highest imaginings; Dante dug a
hell and cast all his personal enemies into it; the author of _The Grand
Assize_ puts the Last Judgment into a municipal court room and tries the
Plutocrat, the Derelict, the Daughter of Joy, the Drunkard, and all his
other pet aversions. This he does with an intellect less alive to the
essence of human nature than that of the most biased, graft-elected
judge of the last decade, for he treats life as a theory and people as
classified emotions.
_Wintering Hay_, by John Trevena. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] This
tragedy of weakness will hold everyone who has ever tried to pour
success into some sieve-like character, too negative to stand alone. So
well is Cyril Rossingall depicted that the reader loses the consummate
art of the author in his seeming artlessness. Its setting is life in
London and Dartmoor; its plot is life as lived by English gentlefolk;
its theme is the reflex effect of events on life; its essence is
simply—life.
_The Story of Beowulf_, translated from the Anglo-Saxon by Ernest J. B.
Kirtland. [Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York.] Once again the ancient
Anglo-Saxon manuscript, treasured through centuries in the British
Museum, has been made over into up-to-date English with all the
trimmings of introduction, foot-notes, appendix and frontispiece. As a
mere layman, we believe it to be well done.
_Stories without Tears_, by Barry Pain. [Frederick A. Stokes Company,
New York.] Trivial of plot, sometimes hardly more than an incident,
these stories capture some poise, pose, or feature of life and cast it
masterfully into a medallion of delightful symmetry. Sad, gay, amusing,
pathetic, they have the de Maupassant twist with all its perennial
fascination.
_Marta of the Lowlands_, by Angel Guimera. [Doubleday, Page and Company,
New York.] What Lady Gregory has done for the Irish, Angel Guimera has
done for the Catalan drama (Catalonia is a province in Spain) by
picturing the characteristics of the people in various dramatic
situations. In _Marta of the Lowlands_ he has shown the tragic and
absolute ownership of the landed proprietor over the peasants who live
on his territory.
_A Soldier of The Legion_, by C. N. and A. M. Williamson. [Doubleday,
Page and Company, New York.] The Williamsons know Northern Africa and if
you know them—you surely do, this being their fifteenth book—you will
know what to expect here. Those people who still can find time for
nothing but war “literature” may be interested to know that the Legion
described in this book is fighting in France for the Allies in the
present war.
_Private Affairs_, by Charles McEvoy. [Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston.] It is human to be curious, and when we get a chance we like to
know all about the intimate affairs of other people. In this book the
affairs are told in such a direct, interesting manner, without the
pettiness of gossip, that we find sufficient excuse for our human
weakness.
The Reader Critic
_George Middleton, New York_:
I read _Wedded_ with much interest and really want to congratulate you
upon your courage in producing it. As I told the author, whom I recently
met, I do not think technically it is perfect: he has overdrawn the
minister and made an author’s comment in his lines. I feel the last line
absolutely out of key; for the effect, in my judgment, would have been
much stronger if the minister had been less obviously the hypocrite.
Aside from a little bungling in the opening, I think, however, that its
sincerity is much more important than this captious criticism. I feel he
put over quite clearly a situation in human life which should be
presented. And it was courageous of you to affront public opinion, as
you no doubt have, and give place to such a sincere little piece of
life. I wonder when the world is going to let us talk about all the
things we now smirk over and know. Once we can place these sex matters
on the same plane of conversation as we do pork and cheese then they
will really cease to be important. I believe in the reticences of taste
and proportion—but not those of subject matter. And sooner or later the
question of birth control must be given wide publicity, so that only
wanted children will come into the world. So long as functionally the
woman must bear the labour and thus suffer unequally in parenthood, so
should we do everything through education to arm her against assuming
unwilling burdens. When children are born of free choice in marriage
then they will partake of a higher dignity, and parenthood itself will
mean more than a functional disturbance and a matter of rebellion it now
is with many. Any play which makes us question our nice polite functions
about morality should be accessible to those not afraid of new ideas. It
is curious how little faith the innate conservative has in human nature
and the finer things of life. So afraid are they that they would bind
people by old traditions and not personally-achieved opinions. _Wedded_
presents in vivid phrase a fragment of life which has no doubt come to
many a woman, and I heartily congratulate you for the courage which
prompted you to give the author a hearing.
_S. H. G., New York_:
The November number is the best yet. I don’t like Iris’s work as well as
I do Bodenheim’s; judging by these poems I think he has been too much
praised. Bodenheim makes some superb contributions to language and
imagery. Langner’s play doesn’t escape the querulous note in spots, but
it is worth doing and is done well on the whole. Darrow’s article is
well-knit and presents an idea. The best thing in the issue is Kaun’s
translation. And I dislike very much your article on Emma Goldman,
because it falls so far below the hardness of thought it should have
had.
I have taken much to heart two articles in the first _New Republic_:
Rebecca West’s _The Duty of Harsh Criticism_ and the editors’ _Force and
Ideas_. We who are saying things in public have a simply tremendous
responsibility not only to feel, but to know, and to use the acid test
on everything we say. Your article shows that you have been carried away
by a personality to approval of a social program, and is the most
convincing proof I have ever seen that belief in anarchism is a product
of the artistic temperament rather than the result of an intelligent
attempt to criticise and remould society. I know you did not intend it
to be so; that is the reason it annoys me so much. It was a wise and
necessary thing to correct misapprehensions about Emma Goldman’s
personality; that you have done fairly well; though even that is marred
by too much protesting and a substitution of a somewhat sentimental
elation for power of mind and emotion. But your offhand generalities on
the top of the third page are just the sort of shoddy thinking that
justifies conservatives in dismissing social theorists with a sneer, and
imprisoning them when they get dangerous. These generalities do not even
accurately represent Wilde’s essay. It is not that I disagree with you;
I recognize a fundamental truth in these things if it could only be
disentangled, made definite, and applied. But to a discerning and
unprejudiced reader it is quite evident that in order to save yourself
the trouble and unromantic grind of doing this, you have made a lot of
meaningless assumptions without really knowing very much about history
or anthropology or psychology or any of the other wonderful tools which
modern heroes have put at the service of the human will. You have the
blind faith of a Catholic saint in divine revelation; the only
difference is that the terms of the revelation are altered.
As a thing entirely apart from the above objection, the sporadic
violence of the anarchists is puerile and ridiculous. The whole muddle
in which the anarchists find themselves on account of their
disagreements as to violence is an example of the necessity of efficient
and intelligent organization—which is exactly what government in its
essence is, to me (but is not now). My own position on anarchism has
become more clearly defined than before. I stand fundamentally with
Montessori on the position that the beginning and the end of revolution
is improvement of the individual. I should be prepared to endorse a
brutal autocracy if that bred better human stock. I am thoroughly
convinced that Emma Goldman could preach until she lost her voice
without producing an appreciable effect. The world has had too much
preaching. There would be something finally tragic about the waste of
such a personality as hers unless there were a better way of
accomplishing her object. She has been working for years, yet
ninety-nine per cent of Americans regard her as a sort of Carrie Nation.
The more we long for her success the more we appreciate her personality,
the more keenly we must criticise her method.
The question of how race hygiene must be applied is a profound and
complex matter, impossible of solution by any individual. It will be
solved gradually, and as a resultant of honest intellectual work by all
forward looking people—more especially by your despised scientists. It
will be a matter of inspired scientific education, of proper industrial
conditions, of profound art stimulus, of sex reform, in short, of most
of the things advocated today by the socialist party. I have a
fair-to-middling imagination, but I totally fail to see how these things
may properly be put into action without intelligent governmental
organization. We simply must not narrow our minds by perfectionist
generalities. It is the duty—and the inspiration—of the poet to
understand and use science, of the scientist to develop the poet in
himself, of all to face grimly every fact which concerns him and banish
forever from his mind sentimentalism. Sentimentalism about ribbons and
candy is sometimes pretty, but sentimentalism about the human race is a
terrible form of blasphemy and the greatest of the sins of pettiness.
Now that I have spoken honestly, don’t think I have joined the ranks of
irascible conservatives, and that I yell because I’ve been prodded. No
one realizes more than I the necessity of greater emotion, or more
sweeping vision. But let’s not make our vision sweeping by the simple
process of cutting off our view!
OBLOMOFFDOM
_Minnie Lyon, Chicago_:
We are told by literary authorities that a certain Goncharoff occupies
the place next to Turgeniev and Tolstoy in Russian literature. As to
this I cannot vouch, but I can say that he has written a most profound
and wonderful book called _Oblomoff_ wherein he has depicted in
convincing terms the enthralling bondage of Russia’s intellectuals in
her days of stagnant inactivity. From this book was coined the
phrase—“Russian Malady of Oblomoffdom”, so well did it dissect her
diseased and irresolute will—a malady so universal as to make one feel
that _Oblomoff_ was written for us as well as for Russia. It certainly
is a direct emphasis upon a condition which prevails so largely both in
our personal and social life that few can read this inimitable pen
portrait without a sneaking feeling that some of his own lineaments are
limned therein.
Goncharoff writes of his hero: “The joy of higher inspiration was
accessible to him—the miseries of mankind were not strange to him....
Sometimes he cried bitterly in the depths of his heart about human
sorrows. He felt unnamed, unknown sufferings and sadness, and a desire
of going somewhere far away,—probably into that world towards which
Stoltz had tried to take him in his younger days. Sweet tears would then
flow upon his cheek. It would also happen that he would feel hatred
towards human vices, towards deceit, towards the evil which is spread
all over the world; and he would then feel the desire to show mankind
its diseases. Thoughts would then burn within him, rolling in his head
like waves in the sea; they would grow into decisions which would make
all his blood boil; his muscles would be ready to move, his sinews would
be strained, intentions would be on the point of transforming themselves
into decisions.... Moved by a moral force he would rapidly change over
and over again his position in his bed; with a fixed stare he would lift
himself from it, move his hand, look about with inspired eyes ... the
inspiration would seem ready to realize itself, to transform itself into
an act of heroism—and then, what miracle, what admirable results might
one not expect from so great an effort! But—the morning would pass away,
the shades of evening would take the place of broad daylight—and with
them the strained forces of Oblomoff would incline towards rest—the
storm in his soul would subside—his head would shake off the worrying
thoughts—his blood would circulate more slowly in his veins—and Oblomoff
would slowly turn over and recline on his back; look sadly through his
window upon the sky, following sadly with his eyes the sun which was
setting gloriously.... And how many times had he thus followed with his
eyes that sunset!”
How easy to fall back upon a soft bed of _concessions_—and drift into a
world of forgetfulness! It is just into terrible inertia—this every day
and _every_ day humdrum conservatistic acceptance of things as they
are—that THE LITTLE REVIEW comes with its laughter of the gods; it is so
joyous, so fearless, so sure of its purpose, and hurls itself against it
with its vital young blood and its burning young heart, and pleads with
it for a re-creation of ideals in living, life, and art, and a bigger
comprehension of what life and art can mean to the individual and to the
race, if the individual will only open his heart and mind to these
limitless freedoms. And it does not say: “Look, this is the only way;”
but “come all ye who have something to offer—only let it be sincere,
true, and unafraid.” And because of this big inclusiveness, we sometimes
hear our friend, the sophisticated critic, say: “It lacks
sophistication.”—What is sophistication anyway? Isn’t it something that
has been baked and dried a long time? I wonder if every thoughtful
reader does not grow weary of petty criticism! It is the twin sister (it
has not the virility to be a boy twin) of Oblomoffdom, and lives as a
parasite upon the brains of others. (I like that word _Oblomoffdom_; it
covers such a multitude of indictments with an economy of words.) Let us
have criticism—yes, by all means; but let it _be_ criticism—critical in
values, illuminating in meaning, clear in exposition, telling us how and
_why_. Then we’ll give you our respectful and unbiased attention. Too
much of the stuff that passes as criticism is merely a “personal
attitude,” a channel for expressing a prejudice for (often) something
too big for the critic’s grasp. How often, too, does one grow a bit
heart-weary on hearing some big personality, some fine intellect limit
itself to one vision—its own.
Why not throw that attitude aside as an outworn garment, and welcome any
force, simply and gladly, that can stimulate a spark of life-urge within
us? A more courageous and intense love of truth, of men, of life.
And so, we welcome you, LITTLE REVIEW, with a _Happy New Year_ and a
_long life_—as a Rebel spirit amongst us, fighting our deadly
Oblomoffdom.
Statement of Ownership, Management,
Circulation, Etc., required by the Act
of August 24, 1912
of _THE LITTLE REVIEW_ published monthly at
_Chicago, Ill._, for _October 1st, 1914_.
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Building, Chicago_.
Managing Editor, _Same_.
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Publisher, _Same_.
Owners: (If a corporation, give its name and
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securities: _None_.
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day of _Sept., 1914_.
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Poetry
A Magazine of Verse
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Poems Edith Wyatt
Annie Shore and Johnnie Doon } Patrick Orr
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AN INDIVIDUALIST REVIEW
Those who wish a slight respite from the strain of war should
read THE EGOIST.
BECAUSE
It contains no articles by naval and military experts;
No tales of atrocities;
It continues to publish its literary and dramatic articles,
poetry and serial stories;
Its leaders on the war deal exclusively with the philosophic side
of that phenomenon;
Its only “war news” consists of an extremely interesting personal
diary of the war in Paris, kept by Mme. Ciolkowska.
CONTRIBUTORS: Dora Marsden, Ford Madox Hueffer, Allen Apward,
James Joyce, Remy de Gourmont, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington,
Mme. Ciolkowska, J. G. Fletcher, H. D., Amy Lowell, F. S. Flint,
Leigh Henry, Huntly Carter, R. W. Kauffman, William Carlos
Williams, Frances Gregg, Robert Frost, etc., etc.
TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION: Yearly, U. S. A. $3.25; six months, $1.65;
three months, 85 cents. Single copies, post free, 7d cents.
Subscriptions should be sent to Miss H. S. Weaver, Oakley House,
Bloomsbury Street, London, W. C.
Transcriber’s Notes
At the bottom of page 1, within Amy Lowell's _The Allies_, there is the
centered word
(_Over_)
which seems out of place and is not found in later editions of the text.
Speculating whether this was printed on purpose, e.g., to inform the
reader to turn over the page to read the rest, we decided to reproduce
it here as it was printed.
Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.
The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect
correctly the headings in this issue of THE LITTLE REVIEW.
The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here
(before/after):
[p. 10]:
... My petunias like censors, snowy white and full of honey? ...
... My petunias like censers, snowy white and full of honey? ...
[p. 18]:
... of the spiritual formulalist. Yet both are wrong. The Problem
can be ...
... of the spiritual formulaist. Yet both are wrong. The Problem
can be ...
[p. 18]:
... imposes on matural forms. The law-giver and reformer of
social customs ...
... imposes on natural forms. The law-giver and reformer of
social customs ...
[p. 31]:
... of his cane and withdrew from men, waiting like a sower who
hath thrown ...
... of his cave and withdrew from men, waiting like a sower who
hath thrown ...
[p. 31]:
... loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by
some manatour of conscience. ...
... loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by
some minotaur of conscience. ...
[p. 41]:
... Under the rock, our trusting place in the wood, ...
... Under the rock, our trysting place in the wood, ...
[p. 49]:
... rather than expose by inquisitive aestheticians. Of such is
the magical ...
... rather than exposed by inquisitive aestheticians. Of such is
the magical ...
[p. 53]:
... morbid, commonplace treatment of Peter, “the maginative
child,” as an ...
... morbid, commonplace treatment of Peter, “the ’maginative
child,” as an ...
[p. 55]:
... Mr. Thorley, who did the Balzac, has proved that in the rôle
or a translator he runs ...
... Mr. Thorley, who did the Balzac, has proved that in the rôle
of a translator he runs ...
[p. 58]:
... for the Catlan drama (Catalonia is a province in Spain) by
picturing the characteristics ...
... for the Catalan drama (Catalonia is a province in Spain) by
picturing the characteristics ...
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Little Review, January 1915 (Vol. 1, No. 10)" ***
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